
Who Controls Diners’ Data? OpenTable Moves to Assert Control - petethomas
https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-controls-diners-data-opentable-moves-to-assert-control-11552644121
======
splonk
Let me just start by saying I am entirely on the restaurant's side in this,
and believe that this just another attempt at vendor lock-in from OpenTable.
Restaurants have been fighting for customer control with OT for a long time,
and at the end of the day, I'm fine with the restaurant, who actually see me
in person, talk to me, and serve me the food, keeping notes on me to improve
service. OT, less so. I'm not particularly personally concerned about privacy
in this space, but it seems much better to have this data split up in the
hands of the people who actually see me in person, rather than the faceless
tool trying to aggregate my behavior.

To add some color to this, I recently was shown my customer notes by the GM at
a medium-high end Michelin starred restaurant where I've been a regular for a
long time. There's some basic notes from the early days about the name of my
partner I was dining with, and food allergies and preferences. There's also a
long, long list over several years of every extra dish that was sent out (I
generally get 2-3 extra courses at this place), with the goal of not
duplicating those courses. The notes have tailed off for the past few years
because, probably because everybody knows me and has chatted with me at this
point, so they know they can just ask me for whatever, and that I'm a pretty
easy customer.

So like I said, I'm comfortable with this level of information in the hands of
the restaurant. Pretty much everyone I've talked to in the industry is
interested in this information strictly for the purposes of better service -
nobody has grandiose plans of ever using this data outside of their own
restaurant. OT provides a nice service in standardizing and simplifying the
reservation process, but I'm inclined to think this is an power grab to try to
force restaurants to stay within their ecosystem - and frankly, at the end of
the day, I don't much care if OT lives or dies, but I do care about my local
restaurants.

~~~
somuchthis
I couldn't agree more! When I see that companies like GrubHub and their ilk
have menus for restaurants that do delivery, I always look up what I want on
their menu, then call the company directly and place the order over the phone.
It takes about 30 seconds longer than doing it with the web interface and I
can tell them things like, "extra this, leave off that." I also know that the
tip is actually going to the driver if I give it in cash. These middlemen can
take a hike for all I care.

------
bschne
I've been following this somewhat because I learned about Tock, a Chicago
startup founded by one of the Co-Founders/Owners of the Alinea restaurant. [1]

Their founder Nick Kokonas is quite interesting and seems to have a bit of an
ongoing fight with OpenTable, Tock even built a tool where restaurants can
analyze if they're paying too much for OpenTable's services [2].

If it interests you, check out his interview on Tim Ferris' podcast, it's well
worth the listen. [3]

[1] [https://www.exploretock.com/join/](https://www.exploretock.com/join/) [2]
[https://medium.com/tock/weve-built-a-website-to-check-if-
you...](https://medium.com/tock/weve-built-a-website-to-check-if-you-are-
overpaying-for-opentable-there-s-a-40-chance-you-are-b5fe1c8c81aa) [3]
[https://tim.blog/2018/10/18/nick-kokonas/](https://tim.blog/2018/10/18/nick-
kokonas/)

~~~
lisper
I hate Tock, and my wife and I will not eat at any restaurant that requires
that we use them. Eating out is not just about acquiring food. It's a social
ritual, and paying for the meal at the end is an essential part of that
ritual, the culmination of mutual trust between a diner and a restaurateur.
Tock's pay-up-front business model destroys that trust. The not-so-subtle
message to the customer is, "We don't trust you to pay." But that knife cuts
both ways: if you get my money up front, why should I trust you not to cut
corners on the meal that you provide?

I get that restaurants have to protect themselves against no-shows, and I have
no problem handing over a credit card number so that they can charge a no-show
fee. But paying the entire cost of the meal up front is a line that I won't
cross. There are too many excellent alternatives out there still doing
business the old fashioned way, thank God.

~~~
jdreyfuss
Ticketing systems like Tock are speaking to that mutual trust. Reservations
are another form of mutual trust in the restaurant interaction. You're making
a promise to show up and they're promising to hold a table for you. But that's
a very uneven trust. You can bail with no consequence to you, while the
restaurant gets screwed. I see no problem in leveling the playing field.

Besides restaurants are the outlier. Most experience-based services have a
pay-up-front model: concerts, sports games, transportation, conferences,
movies, etc. The reason restaurants generally don't is because the cost isn't
usually predictable up front for each person. For fine prix fixe dining, it
is.

~~~
lisper
> But that's a very uneven trust. You can bail with no consequence to you,
> while the restaurant gets screwed.

Yes, that's true.

> I see no problem in leveling the playing field.

Neither do I. That's why I wrote:

"I get that restaurants have to protect themselves against no-shows, and I
have no problem handing over a credit card number so that they can charge a
no-show fee."

You are the second person I've had to point this out to. Good grief, doesn't
anyone actually read the comments they are responding to (or downvoting)?

~~~
jdreyfuss
People are calling out that your argument is pointing to the wrong step in the
trust interplay. A ticketing system is not at all about a restaurant not
trusting you to pay at the end of the meal and 100% about guaranteeing that
you'll show up in the first place.

As you say, you're fine with restaurants addressing the reservation trust
imbalance, but you apparently don't like the way a ticketing system
accomplishes that. Why? Because you don't like the way it feels as an
experience?

~~~
lisper
> Why? Because you don't like the way it feels as an experience?

Yes. Exactly.

Imagine if you took the menu of the French Laundry and served it in a
McDonalds. The exact same food. Would you still pay $300 a plate?

~~~
jdreyfuss
If the ticketing system significantly detracts from the experience for you,
then you shouldn't eat at those restaurants. That makes sense. But if you're
arguing that restaurants that implement a ticketing system lead to a decline
in quality or actual dining experience, then you'll have to provide some
evidence.

I disagree that restaurants that use a ticketing system lose their incentive
to deliver the best experience they can. These aren't one-off encounters.
Repeat business, reputation, reviews, and word of mouth are all based on the
actual experience. If the food or atmosphere is bad, then a fine dining place
won't last, regardless of the payment dynamics they have.

~~~
lisper
> if you're arguing that restaurants that implement a ticketing system lead to
> a decline in quality or actual dining experience, then you'll have to
> provide some evidence.

I am not saying that this has happened, only that the pay-in-full-in-advance
model removes one of the incentives that keeps it from happening. It may be
that the removal of this incentive won't actually change anything, I don't
know.

> These aren't one-off encounters

In the case of high-end restaurants, they often are. Not very many people can
afford to be regulars at the French Laundry.

> If the food or atmosphere is bad, then a fine dining place won't last,

Maybe. But at the extreme high end, a restaurant can let things slide and
coast on its reputation for a pretty long time.

~~~
hvoiiita
So what happens in the hypothetical that the food sucks and the bill for $300
comes to you. Do you just not pay?

You are implicitly believing in their reputation by selecting the fine dining
establishment. I don't really do fine dining so excuse me if this is ignorant,
but it seems to me you don't really have recourse after the fact.

Problem is that there are millions of potential customers all who may or may
not be flakes. When business could be make or break by one reservation backing
out, they have much more to lose way more often than you having an awful
experience at a reputable establishment. Tock makes sense in this scenario but
you seem like you're being completely unempathetic to the economics of the
situation.

~~~
lisper
> So what happens in the hypothetical that the food sucks and the bill for
> $300 comes to you. Do you just not pay?

The one time this actually happened to me we walked out before we actually got
any food. But yes, we didn't pay (obviously). If we'd paid ahead it would have
been a real problem.

> Problem is that there are millions of potential customers all who may or may
> not be flakes.

Yes, I understand that, and I am not unsympathetic to the restaurant's need to
mitigate this risk somehow. But fobbing 100% of the risk back onto the
customer is not the right answer IMHO, and any restaurant that does this is
not going to get my business. There are lots of other possibilities (50% up
front, no-show fee, reputation tracking) that I would be happy to sign up for,
but not that.

------
dabernathy89
OpenTable says this is about customer privacy, but...

> [OpenTable] will block restaurants from giving competitors access to diner
> data acquired through OpenTable unless they pay new fees

Ah. In any case, not sure why OpenTable believes they own this information. If
I make a reservation at a restaurant, particularly if I follow through and
actually eat there, I fully expect the restaurant to own the knowledge about
that reservation.

~~~
jak92
> _not sure why OpenTable believes they own this information._

Probably within the terms and conditions that no one reads.

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jak92
How about _I_ control _my_ data and _my_ preferences.

My meal is a one time transaction where you provide food in exchange for my
money.

~~~
acheron
Easy enough: call the restaurant yourself then.

When you use a service like Opentable, it's hard to claim you thought it was a
"one time transaction" that would be forgotten about when it shows your
reservation history to you every time you log in.

~~~
jak92
> _Easy enough: call the restaurant yourself then._

Except many now use a service provider to manager their reservations. Once
they have your phone number (to confirm) it's no longer a one time
transaction.

~~~
chrisan
You can state you don't want to give them your number when making a
reservation. Of if you happen to find someone persistent about it and you
really want to continue to give them your business just use a fake number

I've never had a restaurant actually call to confirm I was coming.

~~~
melq
It's very common for restaurants to text to confirm these days.

~~~
jak92
So not only do you need a phone number, it must be a mobile phone ?

~~~
melq
I'm talking about after having made a reservation through an app like
OpenTable.

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Forge36
Outline link to avoid paywall
[https://outline.com/fMSNSn](https://outline.com/fMSNSn)

In this case it appears open table is limiting data access to third parties
(I'm surprised this wasn't already in place).

I'm not sure what data OpenTable has or what they are now requesting
restaurants pay to share.

~~~
rlabrecque
Someone that works in the industry probably knows better, but OpenTable has
your full history of your dining experiences booked through them. What
restaurants you frequent, how often, what time you go, how large your party
was, how often you failed to show up.

I believe when you booked a reservation the restaurant got to see all of this.

------
bkthrowaway
I previously worked at an employer who dealt with restaurant bookings. I'm not
going to mention who they are, but it's not OpenTable.

One of the key things I built while there was around data importing. The
burden of getting the data to us was mostly on the customer, but some
customers had a seriously hard time moving away so we had to build custom
tools specifically for some competitors.

One product would only let you download encrypted backups, but they refused to
give the decryption key. In their minds, this was following their policy to
let you have your data, even if it was only readable by them. We ultimately
had to abuse their APIs to scrape the data out.

At least OpenTable is giving the option of exporting data, because not
everyone in the industry does it, and the story above was not an isolated
incident. We scraped data all the time, but only with the customers
permission.

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guelo
If I give my email and phone number to OpenTable in order to make a
reservation I am absolutely not giving the restaurant the right to scrape my
data out of OpenTable and give it to SevenRooms with whom I have no
relationship. I am 100% on OpenTable's side in this.

~~~
Kalium
In the eyes of restaurants, your relationship is with _them_. As a result,
they feel fully justified in taking it wherever they please. No service
company wants to be at the mercy of an intermediary.

Of course, I don't trust restaurants and hotels to not abuse my info, so...

~~~
JohnFen
> As a result, they feel fully justified in taking it wherever they please.

Which is 100% abusing the relationship I have with them.

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kbos87
OpenTable is misunderstanding where the balance of power lies here. I’m not
their customer, I’m the restaurants’ customer, despite the fact that OpenTable
has maybe found a way to reduce a little bit of the friction in the situation.
This is purely a play to lock people in under the convenient guise of
protecting user data.

------
kthejoker2
When will we have a world where OpenTable has to signup to me? And I
release/sell/donate none/some/all of my data to my
friends/family/companies/whomever I want?

Who's working on this?

~~~
dominotw
How do buyers trust you that your data is actually legit and not something you
made up?

~~~
kthejoker2
Finally, a use case for blockchain ...

Jokes aside, let the market figure it out. Authorized aggregators (Qualtrics,
Nielsen) will emerge; ad tech will compete for your real data; correlations
will continue behind the scenes between your behavior (the thing the companies
actually own) and your data; maybe you never will, and we're back to guessing
which half of your marketing is working.

~~~
dominotw
any solution will need fb to authenticate that data is legit and FB will never
provide such a service.

~~~
kthejoker2
No, any solution just needs to incentivize people to share real data. If I
don't share where I live, you can't make useful showtime recommendations, if I
don't share who my friends are, you can't send me their cat memes, etc

The market will solve this, FB can play along or go jump.

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Spooky23
It's amazing that this is put up with. OpenTable provides a pretty trivial
service but has good integration with point of sale and in no way have any
business owning the customer relationship.

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ghaff
The article isn't terribly specific but presumably dining and spending
patterns of various sorts that can be valuable in the aggregate.

I have to confess that, as a user, I find it useful to be able to book the
maximum number of restaurants through one or two apps whether or not they also
support making reservations through other means. Especially on mobile, I'm not
a big fan of navigating through often crappy web sites and potentially having
to provide a bunch of info to find there are no reservations available at 7pm.
OpenTable is just a few clicks.

~~~
JohnFen
> Especially on mobile, I'm not a big fan of navigating through often crappy
> web sites and potentially having to provide a bunch of info to find there
> are no reservations available at 7pm.

Me neither. That's why I call the restaurant instead of using their web page.
The whole thing is done in a couple of minutes.

~~~
greglindahl
I'm curious if you've noticed that many restaurants no longer answer their
phones?

~~~
ghaff
I'm not sure that's anything new. Sure, I'll call a restaurant if there's no
easy way to book online. But this doesn't work as well when I'm traveling
overseas (language, cost of phone call) and, as you say, phone lines are busy,
get put on hold, phone not picked up, etc.

Also, with an app, I can see upfront what my options are and potentially see
if I have better choices elsewhere.

------
mbostleman
I control it because I almost never take the time to make reservations. In
fact, places in which a reservation is necessary almost by definition means a
degraded experience for me.

~~~
JohnFen
There are a number of otherwise excellent restaurants in my area that have
stopped accepting reservations entirely and switched to a "first come, first
served" model.

I stopped going to those restaurants because of the number of times that I've
shown up only to be informed that the wait list is over an hour long and we've
ended up having to eat at the greasy spoon down the road because we're hungry
and have run out of time.

If I can't make reservations (directly with the establishment -- things like
OpenTable don't count), I won't eat at the establishment. The gamble isn't
worth it.

~~~
beckler
I think it's worse when you make a reservation, but it doesn't mean anything.

For example, my wife and I went to a PF Changs on a holiday. We had a
reservation we scheduled at least a week ahead of time, but it meant nothing,
we were put at the end of the queue. It wouldn't have made a difference if we
never made the reservation at all.

~~~
JohnFen
Yes, but that's a problem with that particular restaurant, not with the idea
of reservations. If I were bumped like that, I wouldn't go back (especially if
we're talking about a chain restaurant) -- life is too short.

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mlthoughts2018
While there is plenty to complain about with OpenTable, I find their
competitor Resy to be far worse on almost every dimension of privacy & data
sharing. Meanwhile, Resy has been aggressively pushing to undercut OpenTable’s
price per reservation to get restaurants to switch over lately.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
How is Resy worse? I've only used them once, as far as I remember; they seem
to have been courting higher-end restaurants that presumably didn't want to
put up with OpenTable.

~~~
justtopost
Op mentions privacy and data sharing in particular, and there are 2 others in
this tgread aledging bag faith on their part in that regard.

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sqrt17
Yet another example where a user data profile is created and anyone but the
actual user whose data it is will claim that the data is theirs.

It's the (now-)unsavoury point of platform businesses, who step into the
business relation between a user and a service provider to mine and aggregate
and profile data to provide value in a surveillance economy. Would this even
fly in GDPR-land, where you can only process data within the narrow confines
of the actual business relationship?

~~~
greglindahl
OT could claim that they are a service provider that helps consumers discover
restaurants they'll like, based on mining their reservation history.

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beat
I wonder if this applies to chains, or to situations where multiple
restaurants are owned by the same person/company? Some of my favorite local
restauranteurs own three or four places, with different focus, but often a lot
of customer overlap.

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ape4
OpenTable should be replaced with an, er, open API standard.

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dontbenebby
Do restaurants who use OpenTable usually have an analog option? (Eg: call and
ask for a table?)

~~~
justtopost
Open table is the exception, analog is the rule.

~~~
dontbenebby
Yeah I'm just curious if it's replacing or supplementing

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dominotw
lol. What a world we live in.

