We’ve often been asked why Incanto is not listed on OpenTable.com. For those of you not familiar with the service, OpenTable is the most successful online restaurant reservation portal on Earth; a place on the Web where diners can search for and make reservations at leading restaurants, via a browser or smartphone. Restaurants like Incanto that chose not to offer their seats through OpenTable find themselves in a shrinking minority.
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As VSAG Principal and the Concept Developer and Managing Partner of one of the most popular restaurants in the country, I thought I would offer some insight and true-life case study experience to respond to Mark Pastore’s article about OpenTable. In short, we learned how to make the software work for us. Yes, there are still challenges and the onus remains on the restaurateur to learn the system, but we did, and saw our sales increase 15% at our already #1 booked restaurant in the country (through OpenTable) and#1 for the last 8 months in the greater Washington, DC region.
Mark Pastore’s well-written article questions the true value of OpenTable to the restaurateur, whom he says spends more money on the system than it is “actually worth.” He conducted a survey amongst fellow restaurateurs and what those that participated in the survey don’t mention (and the one member of the dozen that felt OpenTable increased the value of his restaurant probably knows) is what we have found to be the most important ingredient to OpenTable’s recipe: the software.
The OpenTable software is a catalyst to optimize your FOH operations: the analytics, the metrics, data and health of the business. Using tools like turn table time reports, tracking server performance and seat utilization can increase sales? But only if you use it.
To be fair, the price of OpenTable assumes you will use the robust software, software that can be overwhelming in a world of user-friendliness. OpenTable is growing faster than the company can keep up with, thus unable to provide customer service that provides assistance in receiving 100% utilization of their product. While there is phone customer support and a video-filled learning website, these only review the entry-level functions most users already know – and what we know at Founding Farmers – the meat of the burger is in the analytics; functions we were intimidated by at first.
Now, we embrace it, even with our average monthly OpenTable bill of $6,000. The story continues here: http://bit.ly/b7SW8c to see what we did and how we used OpenTable to benefit and to change our loathing of the ‘drug’ that OpenTable felt like we were addicted to, into positive / loving the hero that it had become.
Dan Simons
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