They’ve also proactively begun making changes to their apps and website to reflect the realities of the restaurant business today, offering both temporary and permanent solutions for restaurants that saw their operations upended overnight. All fairly quickly suspended most fees they charge restaurants to use their software. In response to the slowdown, OpenTable and its competitors have been forced to pivot as quickly as the restaurants they serve. That is: There were essentially zero reservations booked. Ten days later, on March 23, every market listed on OpenTable’s COVID-19-inspired state of the industry dashboard showed a 95 to 100 percent reduction in bookings, based on a representative sample of around 20,000 of the roughly 60,0000 restaurants the company supports worldwide. In mid-March, as the national rollout of dining restrictions was just beginning, the company released year-over-year data that showed a 45 percent diner reduction in Seattle, 40 percent in San Francisco, 30 percent in New York, and 25 percent in London, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Of all the brands, OpenTable is the largest reservations service in the U.S. OpenTable collects a per-diner commission fee on each reservation it facilitates, and busy restaurants can expect a monthly bill that easily stretches into thousands of dollars. Prices go up from there depending on additional features like custom messaging, ticketed events, or, in OpenTable’s case, the number of people it brings in the door. Plans vary, but a restaurant can expect to pay at least several hundred dollars per month for a basic plan that includes both reservations and table management. It’s how the host knows where to seat you when you show up for your 8 p.m. Diners use them to book available tables, and restaurants also use them to manage their dining rooms’ floor plan and record notes about customers. But what about the industries that support it? Reservation services like Tock, OpenTable, Yelp, and Resy are big business, and make their money by charging restaurants to use the software. Since the spread of COVID-19 began forcing restaurants across the country to cease dining room operations, there’s been much talk about its effect on both individual restaurants and the industry as a whole. He didn’t ever expect takeout to be his business’s lifeline. “We opened a restaurant for certain reasons,” he says. When he first considered takeout, Gregory Ryan says, “I was like, ‘Oh, shit, am I going to have to get a phone?’ My staff was like, ‘No, absolutely not.’” Today, Bell’s remains phone-free. “Because we only have two on the line.”īut before he could figure out a technical solution on his own, he says, Tock contacted him offering a new online ordering system he could implement quickly. “Not because we think we’re too good for it, or anything,” he says. Plus, the restaurant didn’t ever offer takeout before. He tried to figure out a way to use Tock to accommodate takeout instead of reservations and events in an effort to stay open.
“It wasn’t until the second week of March that we knew something was on its way - but we didn’t know what it looked like yet,” Gregory Ryan says. “I didn’t want that to ruin someone’s experience.” During a typical dinner service pre-COVID-19, about 80 percent of guests had reservations.īecause of its location, in a small town near California’s central coast wine country, Bell’s wasn’t beholden to the early occupancy reduction mandates, and later closures, that happened so quickly in major cities like New York and San Francisco in response to the spread of COVID-19. “I didn’t want to have people sitting at the bar and listen to me explain something that someone can find on the internet,” says Gregory Ryan. The couple had several choices when it came to online reservation booking platforms and ultimately went with Tock, a system that they say worked so well, the restaurant didn’t even need a phone. The pair had worked in restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, and Austin before returning to Daisy’s hometown. Gregory and Daisy Ryan opened Bell’s, a 35-seat French bistro in Los Alamos, California, in 2018.
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