Resy.com Reservations
Terina
Last Thursday evening, I arrived for my dinner reservation at Sofreh, a small Brooklyn restaurant serving excellent and authentic Iranian food on the ground floor of a Prospect Heights brownstone. Since opening in 2018, it has become both a critical darling and a neighborhood favorite, making getting a reservation there all but impossible. So how did I get a table?
According to data pulled from Resy, reservations across New York City made at 5:30 p.m. have jumped from 7.75% over the past two years to 8.31% over the past six months. And 8 p.m. reservations have fallen to just 7.8% of the total dinner reservations in the city, down from 8.31%.
Devorah Lev-Tov is a food, beverage, and travel journalist with bylines in The New York Times, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, Eater, Vogue, and more. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two children, and senior shih-tzu. Follow her dining adventures (usually at a reasonable hour) on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.
We are currently accepting limited phone and online reservations for any size party, seven days a week. Walk-ins are always welcome and encouraged as we make every effort to get you seated as quickly as possible. Reservations are not required.
The Ordinary is open for dinner Wednesday through Sunday starting at 5:00pm. Our bar and patio areas have first come first served seating available where you can enjoy the full experience. To book a reservation with us please see below.
We accept reservations 4 weeks in advance starting at Noon (EST). We are able to accommodate reservations for up to 6 guests. You can book a table online using Resy. Click below to make a reservation using Resy or call us at 843.414.7060.
OpenTable and Resy are software companies that sell both reservation and table management systems to restaurants. These types of systems help restaurants manage their reservations, keep track of guests and manage their floor plan during service hours as guests arrive.
As they deal with reservation management both these companies focus on the full-service end of the restaurant market.
Founded in the late 1990s, OpenTable is currently one of the largest reservation software providers in the world. According to their website, 10 covers are processed on their network every second. This adds up to around 25 million customers a month.
OpenTable operates both as a consumer reservation platform at opentable.com and also as a table management system for restaurants. These two systems synch together as a central place to manage bookings.
OpenTable's main pitch is they provide a marketing channel for restaurants. They do this by delivering more 'incremental' bookings for restaurants through their diner network (opentable.com) and charging a large per-cover fee to restaurants if they want access to that network.
In some circles, this strategy has been controversial since one of the main ways the company attracts diners to opentable.com is through what's known as 'click arbitrage' on Google Adwords. Essentially they buy search ads through Google's ad platform using keywords of individual restaurants in any given city. The cost they pay for the clicks on Google is usually much less than the per cover fee they charge restaurants, and thus, they keep the difference between the two.
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with doing this, but detractors of this approach say that OpenTable is stealing the customers who are looking for the restaurant anyway. So the bookings they provide are ultimately not 'incremental'. In addition, some restaurants have complained that if OpenTable is providing the booking, restaurants don't get an opportunity to establish a long-term relationship with that guest, even though they were already looking for that restaurant online.
On the table management software side, OpenTable was an established company in the US market with very few competitors. This meant that innovation was slow. In the last five + years, however, competitors have sprung up, offering better, faster, and more portable table management systems. The result is that in the last few years, OpenTable has started to play catch-up in terms of releasing new features.
Today, OpenTable has moved in the direction of transforming opentable.com into a more ad-focused restaurant aggregator. OpenTable is owned by Booking Holdings, which operates booking.com and kayak.com amongst others, and opentable.com appears to move away from the diner network approach towards more of a 'booking.com for restaurants' approach.
This approach will allow restaurants with deep pockets, i.e. restaurant groups and large established businesses to gain the most visibility on opentable.com and restaurants should expect to pay an increasing amount in ad costs to continue to use OpenTable as an effective marketing channel.
The pricing of OpenTable's table management and reservation system comes in three-tiers and includes a monthly subscription fee and a per cover charge which differs based on the source of the booking. OpenTable charges a $1-1.5 per cover fee for bookings made through their network and $0.25 per cover fee for bookings made through the restaurant's widget.
Note: If you link the reservation button on your website to your opentable.com profile you will pay $1.50 per cover. In order to pay $0.25 you must use the OpenTable booking widget. Make sure you are implementing this properly to not be overcharged!
Resy offers three pricing tiers for restaurants thinking about using their services. Each with access to different feature sets. If you want to get close to the full Resy experience you need to choose the Platform 360 option at $399/month.
Unlike OpenTable, Resy does not charge a per cover fee on any online reservations.
Their 3 tiers are:
The base pricing tiers of Resy seem well priced when compared to OpenTable but to get the full benefits of Resy there are optional add on features which come with a fee.
For example, their ticketing feature for events, comes with a transaction fee of up to 3%. POS integration costs and extra $100 month as well. Costs can quickly rise for the Resy system when you use all the features and in then the cost ends up not being that much cheaper than OpenTable.
With the rise of social media, content, and community networks, and Google's dominance in search, dedicated booking platforms like OpenTable and Resy are becoming obsolete. Restaurants can focus on Google Business, their social media accounts, and other content websites as marketing channels and avoid altogether the high fees of booking platforms.
Resy and OpenTable require you to buy iPads in order to run their systems. Eat App runs on iPad apps, but also through web, iOS, and Android mobile devices, giving total flexibility to reservation management for restaurants.
Eat App embraces the idea that restaurants should own the guest experience. This ultimately is the way to provide the best hospitality. Featuring a strong privacy policy, Eat App won't sell or use restaurant data.
POS data sharing with the reservation system is a killer app for restaurants and is changing the way restaurants understand guests, operations, and marketing.
Both OpenTable and Resy offer POS integration, but few restaurants know that the type of integration they offer requires staff to manually enter IDs into the POS. This means that countless staff hours are wasted night after night just to maintain the data flow. Eat App has developed a unique, algorithmic-based solution that reduces the time spent by 95%, not to mention pairing that with their state-of-the-art restaurant automation suite to kick efficiency into high gear.
To get started with OpenTable and Resy you need to contact them and speak with their sales team before being able to try out the system. This is an antiquated approach suitable for large enterprise clients. Restaurant owners need a solution they can use themselves without getting stuck in back-and-forth exchanges with sales members.
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