OpenTable for Restaurants

I’ve been using OpenTable for a while now, and unfortunately, the experience has been more frustrating than helpful. Lately, we’ve been dealing with a major issue: fake reservations. People are booking tables and simply not showing up, which results in significant loss of business—especially on busy nights when we could have seated actual paying customers. What makes it worse is that OpenTable’s fees keep increasing, yet the platform doesn’t seem to be doing enough to prevent this kind of behavior. There’s no real accountability for no-shows, and restaurants are left to absorb the cost. For a platform that charges as much as it does, the lack of protection or meaningful solutions for restaurants is disappointing. I hope OpenTable takes this more seriously and invests in better verification or penalty systems to stop fake bookings. Until then, it’s hard to justify the high cost for a service that sometimes does more harm than good.

POV: employee in the restaurant industry. I believe OpenTable should implement a policy to prevent users from making multiple reservations at different restaurants for the same day. As a reservation system designed for scheduling purposes, it relies on accurate data regarding the number of covers or reservations for each evening. Allowing users to make multiple reservations and then cancel once they decide where to dine adversely affects other businesses. This practice not only disrupts labor planning but also impacts the morale of restaurant staff. Implementing measures to discourage such behavior would contribute to a more fair and efficient reservation system for both users and establishments. With the right programming this is highly achievable.

Phone app is very useful, but misses some of the functionality of the full version. It would be useful if it could access the entire guest database, if it would stop signing me out, and if it could update Table status in real time. I do really appreciate the new table view mode, though I wish the time block view was also accessible via mobile, as when guests call me from home looking to reserve when the “book” is “full”, it’s an easier way to see where I might have space to accommodate them. Some other things, just for the developers, it would be useful to have the program be able to have different assumed turn times for different parts of the day (ex. 5PM diners tend to move faster than 7PM diners in this area), or to have certain tables assigned to certain times consistently (like when you have a table for 10 that you want to use both early in the night or late in the night, but don’t want it booked by the first group that grabs it at 6:30PM). I could go on for hours about table time maximization. Feel free to contact me devs.