Next step in escalation: make a bot that books with fake names, sell primo reservations on Craigslist.
Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
111–120 of 167 posts
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#112After reading that I want 10 mins of my life back.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Just raise the price" is an appropriate response to demand for a commodity, but it's an inappropriate response to these scenarios. For example: PAX is trying to build a community event. The target demographic is not "wealthy people who love games", it's "people who love games" Changing the price results in a different convention. Similarly, a popular $20 restaurant can't double their prices to keep demand manageable…
There's this thing here in Copenhagen: http://www.goldentable.com/restaurants-copenhagen/ A number of top restaurants (otherwise booked, on a Saturday night, for 2 weeks) auction off a single table, where 50% of the proceeds go to the restaurant, and the rest to a foundation for gastronomical research. Another approach is to require a credit card and charge almost the price of a full dinner if you don't show up. The…
Alinea and Next in Chicago both use a pre-purchase ticket approach. They also open up tickets on a monthly basis a couple weeks in advance, and all the reasonable times are gone basically immediately. And both are far from cheap places.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#114I love how everyone else who fights for reservations is a filthy hipster, while the author is merely a humble gourmand.
Great quote from a parallel discussion on Metafilter:
"A hipster is someone who enjoys the things I do, but in ways I disapprove of"
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#115I don't understand why they don't do authentication to remove the bots if this really matters.
If it doesn't matter, they should raise prices.
This is an issue in NYC. Some $300/night restaurants have you hyperclicking the moment the reservations open up.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I like Chipotle better than most restaurants.
Enough to bother getting a dinner reservation?
I doubt it; I doubt many would do that at all. In some situations corporate fast-food joints do take reservations (White Castle on Valentine's Day evening is the only example I can think of at the moment) but in those situations they are cashing in on people considering it a novelty. The novelty drives demand to levels that it otherwise never achieves.
If there were only a single Chipotle in NYC, there would almost certainly not be enough demand to require a reservation system (and if they used one anyway, their business would surely suffer). Perhaps you would be willing to call in a reservation for Chipotle, but one person calling in reservations for fast-food isn't going to sustain a business.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#117Given 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.
Seriously? I thought when most people saw a line at a restaurant, they just went somewhere else.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#118Having worked at Ticketmaster for a few years, the first thing that came to mind was the similarities in automated ticket-buying bots.
Thing is, is there really that much of an arbitrage opportunity with restaurant reservations? Is there a place I can go purchase restaurant reservations?
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#119Soon - "Auction Sniper now supports urbanspoon! First 3 reservations are free!" There's something frustrating about reading this. Perhaps its that a technological advancement that was supposed to make life easier is being capitalized on by a small group of technically competent people, shutting out the average user. I was thinking of going to PAX next year a few hours ago and decided to do a bit of research. For this…
Yes, in todays technological society, people who understand technology have advantages. I don't see why that is surprising, given the website you're commenting on. Ultimately this is not about technology, it's about economics. Surely the restaurant should raise their prices until not enough people want to book 2 months in advance to make bots and make this an issue. Or PAX should raise their prices so they don't sell…
Raising prices is the wrong way to address this behavior. Ultimately the restaurant wants to maximize yield, not just average meal price. Open tables are wasted inventory. So the priority should be to stop bots from grabbing reservations for people who aren't that committed to eating at the restaurant (and thereby stealing them from people who would actually go dine.)
A better solution would be to charge for making a reservation, and give that charge back as a credit against the meal. You don't have to raise prices, you increase the probability that someone making a reservation intends to show up, and when you have a no-show, you get compensated for the empty table (and can still give it to a walk-in.)
Restaurants like State Bird are a bit of a poor example, anyway. Regardless of their reservation book they're going to fill all their tables every night anyway right now, and they don't particularly want larger (5+) parties anyway because they're tiny. I think they want prices low enough that they can establish a loyal clientele that will keep them going once they're no longer the "hot spot" in SF. Or maybe (gasp) they like offering their food to a broader range of customers. Chefs tend to be a little more down-to-earth.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#120You 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 wal…
From their site: "We welcome walk-ins on a first-come, first-served basis and set aside about a third of our seats for those guests every night, including our chef’s counter and several tables in the dining room. "