Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or open a second location.
Restaurants don't scale linearly.
McDonalds.
Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
21–30 of 167 posts
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#22Captcha?
I'd try:
- detect obvious bots (e.g. clients requesting form without loading CSS or JS or filling it in instantly), suspicious IPs (EC2, VPS hosting) and release smaller batch of seats to them (don't deny completely in case of false positive).
- create waiting list and give reservations randomly to people on the list (while the list can be spammed as well, humans would still have better chance than reserving between 4:00:00 and 4:00:01). Also bot authors would have to be creative to avoid creating easy to spot patterns of names/times in the list.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#23You folks don't actually think that opentable/urban spoon reservation availability is representative of a restaurant's entire table inventory on a given night do you? Pick up a phone (dirty little secret, restaurants segment customers too).
Restaurants typically hold back inventory from online reservation systems for two reasons. They either think they can fill seats and they rather not pay the per cover fees OT and UrbanSpoon charge or they want to hold seats for walk-ins. Well three if you count timing seating to keep the front of the house and kitchen from being overloaded.
State Bird Provisions however has so much demand that there is a line for walk-ins hoping for a cancellation an hour before the restaurant opens and they appear to not actually hold back much (any?) inventory specifically for walk-ins.
But generally speaking yes, you will often be able to call a restaurant and get a table or possibly walk in even when their online reservation system shows up as full.
Also, you can also put yourself on a waitlist at many restaurants. If someone calls to cancel, before they release the reservation back to the online system, they'll go through their waitlist and call and ask if you want it instead.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#24I bet this bot race is doing a great deal to improve relations between San Francisco's tech population and...well, everyone else in SF.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#25This is remarkable. Concert tickets are also being bought this way by bots for scalpers. Ebay sniper bots are commonly used. High Frequency trading is the high end this. Perhaps it is unavoidable, perhaps other means for selling things online should be sought out, text messages with semantic replies required or something?
This is why we can't have nice things. On the topic of scalpers, Louis CK apparently hired [0] scalpers to help build some anti-scalper checks (I assume it is similar to fraud detection rules: multiple purchases from the same IP, out of town billing addresses) that runs on his website where he now sells all of his tickets. If you get flagged by a rule, the ticket goes to will-call, so you have to show ID and the cred…
> The venue has a perverse incentive allowing scalpers to buy every last ticket they can get their greedy little hands on. As long as a ticket gets sold, they don't care. Screw the fans.
Everything I've seen trying to explain the scalping phenomenon appeals to the idea that this is completely backwards from true. Specifically, the theory is that the venue's incentive is to fill seats, which is why tickets are so dramatically underpriced (price too low -> shortage of seats -> all seats get filled -> the act appears to be popular). From the venue's perspective, a seat sold to a scalper is a seat they lose money on and that might not be filled during the performance (since the scalper's incentive is to charge a realistic price), which is a double loss to the venue.
In sum, selling tickets to scalpers gets the venues an amount of money they don't want (they were guaranteed to sell out anyway), in order to generate an effect they don't want (some seats will be empty during the performance). Where's the perverse incentive?
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#26> This means that I'm bound to compete for reservations at good restaurants with the the hipsters if this restaurant is so popular, isn't it too mainstream for hipsters? /philosoraptor
Please for the love of god keep the shitty memes on reddit.
sorry, forgot to apply the stick up my this morning, so I couldn't appreciate the seriousness of foodie reservations in sf.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Restaurants don't scale linearly.
McDonalds.
Sure, that's one kind of restaurant. I've never heard of anyone trying to get a reservation there, though, and I'm pretty sure there's a direct relationship between the lack of demand for reservations, and the restaurant's ability to scale.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#28Since you can't RESELL your reservation, I think the answer is for the restaurant to black list exactly one sniper, maybe just for one year, and publicize doing so.
Everyone else, who has been fighting to get a reservation for months the old fashion way, will not decry your loss.
And I doubt very much you would risk getting blacklisted for sniping reservations off their site, since you appear to love the restaurant so much.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#29Given their popularity, why doesn't this restaurant just get rid of the reservation system altogether? A lot of the popular/trendy/hipster magnet places here do this since it saves hassle and creates a certain allure when lines are out the door for a table.
Given this place has a line outside of it well before it opens on the off chance someone cancels, removing reservations would mean everyone would have to wait for a table.
I can't think of a worse customer experience than taking someone on a date, waiting in a congested line outside at night for 45 minutes only to be told that there are no tables available.
Not getting a reservation on the other hand just means that I can just go somewhere else.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#30You folks don't actually think that opentable/urban spoon reservation availability is representative of a restaurant's entire table inventory on a given night do you? Pick up a phone (dirty little secret, restaurants segment customers too).
Or walk in and slip them a $20. It's the old school hack.