Restaurants have to be able to adapt to the ebb and flow of reservations at a moment’s notice. ![]() In just 12 months, Yelp doubled their weekly average inbound SMS traffic while giving their customers a whole new avenue of communication. Dining like this can only happen with mobile technology.Ĭommunication is a critical part of that customer experience, and restaurants are capitalizing on the opportunity to communicate with customers via text. They know exactly when they’ll be seated, and can grab a drink somewhere else before dinner. ![]() This way, diners aren’t anchored to the foyer of the restaurant. For the unlucky diners who missed out on a reservation, Liholiho reserves seats at the bar for walk-ins and coordinates the walk-in wait times via text using 2-way Diner Messaging. Liholiho keeps the lucky customers who got seats up to date on their reservations by sending them SMS straight from Yelp Reservations. ![]() That same page also listed the crowd-sourced design startup Chirply as a potential acquisition - so keep your eyes peeled there.At Liholiho Yacht Club, a popular restaurant in San Francisco, “tables at Liholiho are filled virtually as soon as they become available,” says Brian Howell, Engineering Manager at Yelp. Seems like Yelp won out in the end, though. We’d actually spotted SeatMe listed as a “potential acquisition” on one of Square’s hiring pages (of all places), so we had a feeling that the company was looking for a buyer. We will continue to provide the same great product and service that we hope you’ve come to love and rely on. How does this change your SeatMe service? It doesn’t. Update: From an email sent to SeatMe’s current customers, it sounds like the service will go on: We’re reaching out to Yelp/SeatMe for clarification there. As for what this all means for current SeatMe customers? That… goes unmentioned. Yelp says that they’ll be bringing the SeatMe team in to help them build out their own reservation system, expanding their time-slotting offerings from just restaurants and night clubs to things like spas, dentists, and salons. No wonder he was so tight lipped future plans and if anything spoke a little to rosey about them. ![]() While at LeWeb London 2013, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s CEO, was pressured time and time again to talk about their open table partnership. It also has a few other neat tricks, like texting customers when their table is ready, or flagging a return customer’s known allergens and seating preferences.Ĭompetitor OpenTable has been powering Yelp’s integrated reservation since around June of 2010 - this acquisition presumably means that that deal will dry up sooner than later (Yelp tells us they “believe SeatMe complements existing partnerships.”) As pointed out by commenter Max Lemos, below: The web app lets restaurant owners easily add an online reservation system to their own site or Facebook page, while the iPad app lets the restaurant’s host/hostess manage their tables on the fly. SeatMe’s main offering is part web service, part iPad app. Update: Looks like they acquired them for $2.2 million in cash and 263,000 shares of common stock, pinning the acquisition price at a total up to $12.7 million. No word yet on the acquisition price, though we’re digging. Yelp has just announced that they’ve agreed to acquire SeatMe, the startup that set out to battle OpenTable in the restaurant reservation space.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |