Tech Startups Fan the Flames of Restaurant Reservation Wars

How far would guests go to get a reservation at the hottest restaurant in town? According to a handful of startups, they’d stop at almost nothing, including paying for a reservation under a fake name.

The Rise of the Reservation Bots

Several years ago, a handful of tech-savvy foodies began noticing a pattern of interference in online reservation services. The moment a restaurant reservation opened, it was immediately snatched up. Noting that the reservations opened and closed almost simultaneously, it was obvious that it wasn’t people who were snatching up those reservations; it was bots. Those pesky bots capable of manipulating web traffic, crawling web pages and sending automated tweets were stealing reservations.

The same tech-savvy foodies who lost their reservations to bots responded by developing bots of their own. Scanning several times per minute, reservation bots immediately identify and book open reservations. While some bot creators used the bots for their own gains, others, including engineer Diogo Mónica, released the bot to the public. According to Mónica, everyone deserves a chance to get a reservation, not just foodies who can write code.

Welcome to the Reservation Wars: Sorry, We’re Booked

“Disgusting,” “hurtful,” “sleazy, “irresponsible,” and “unethical”: These are just some of the names being hurled at San Francisco startup ReservationHop, the service that allows guests to book those impossible-to-get restaurant reservations. Unlike OpenTable, a free reservation service, ReservationHop charges guests as much as $12 to book a reservation.

While this may not seem wildly unethical, especially if guests are willing to pay, the process of booking the reservation is like something out of a movie: Sign up, pay the fee and wait for ReservationHop to email you the fake name to use at the restaurant. The issue isn’t so much about paying for the reservation. It’s about the revenue restaurants lose when guest fail to show up for their reservations.

Bryan Mayer, founder of ReservationHop, currently has no answer to the potentially devastating loss of revenue his service could cause when broken reservations lead to empty tables. According to TechCrunch, Mayer is willing to work with restaurants to combat the problem, although there aren’t any definitive plans in place. With the backlash against Mayer and ReservationHop on Twitter, including expletive-filled tweets identifying Mayer as the Satan of the restaurant industry, it’s unclear if those relationships will come to fruition.

Beating the Bots

According to Eater — San Francisco, OpenTable has developed a captcha to prevent bots from hijacking reservations, although most people are skeptical of its effectiveness. The issue may never be resolved, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. Guests are fed up, and they’re giving up on getting reservations at in-demand restaurants. To combat the issue, an establishment must not only keep up with these trends in the industry but also keep an open line of communication with its guests.

Establishments must provide ways for guests to communicate their concerns, make suggestions for improvements and air their grievances. By keeping track of interactions with your guests, you can identify key issues and complaints and develop a strategy to provide your guests with solid answers and actionable responses.

At Pedanco, we’re all about helping you improve your conversations with your guests. We don’t fight bots, but we’ve developed a platform to ensure that your relationship with your guests is more powerful than any web crawling bot.

Image courtesy of Chris Isherwood