OpenTable has evolved in recent years to become a leading resource for online reservations and improving your restaurant’s visibility and accessibility to customers. While there’s no doubt that the technology helps to improve your foot traffic, is it really worth the cost?
With a global reach spanning 60,000 restaurants in 80 countries, OpenTable seats more than one billion diners each year. It’s this impressive presence throughout the culinary world that has helped the platform to be thought of as essential among restaurant owners.
However, the cost implications of using OpenTable are proving to be a challenge for restaurants of all sizes, leading to some seeking out innovative alternatives at lower prices.
In all, the cost of running OpenTable for your restaurant involves an average $1,000 setup and hardware fee, around $200 as a monthly subscription fee, and then between $0.25 and $7.50 per diner per booking reservation fee.
Reservation fees can vary because of their cost structures. While making a reservation costs $0.25 per diner for bookings that originated from the restaurant’s website, this fee rises to $1 if the booking originated from the OpenTable website or mobile app. Finally, it can cost $7.50 per diner for a reservation that’s made through the OpenTable 1000-point table reward program.
Although OpenTable may be playing a key role in filling reservations for your tables, the associated costs can significantly eat into your profit margins and even leave you operating at a loss among budget-conscious diners.
However, many alternative strategies can help you to improve your bottom line while maintaining a high quality of service. With this in mind, let’s explore four excellent ways to cut your bill without losing customers in the process:
1. Fintech Reservations
One great way to make your reservation technology more efficient is to use fintech innovations to tap into a more cost-effective alternative platform.
Platforms like Eat App and Allset, with more conducive pricing models, can offer all of the benefits of OpenTable at a fraction of the cost.
As a guest data platform, Eat App offers full-featured table and reservation management systems alongside customer feedback, marketing, and analytics insights. This can help to democratize your customer data and improve your operational efficiency.
Likewise, Allset helps to streamline the dining experience for customers with the help of point-of-sale (POS) integration and access to marketing insights.
Eat App’s monthly subscription rates start at a more manageable $129 per month. However, Allset requires no monthly fee at all, and instead works with an 8% to 12% commission structure, along with a transactional fee of 2.9%. This can make the platform extremely lucrative to smaller restaurants.
2. Contactless Dining
Another way of replicating the efficiency of online booking platforms is by improving your payment infrastructure. Mobile wallets have grown in popularity in recent years and the likes of Apple Pay and Google Pay have now become a core facet of a positive customer experience.
Incorporating mobile payment options can help significantly enhance processing restaurant payments while attracting customers who prefer a frictionless dining experience.
By offering more flexible payment choices, you can maximize your reach in attracting customers without having to modernize large swathes of your ordering process.
3. Cost-Saving Automation
Automation technology can also pay dividends throughout the restaurant industry. Because manual processes can cause staff to spend more time on tasks that don’t necessarily require human intervention.
As an example, managers may have to drop what they’re doing to accept an alcohol delivery, which could then take up more time to manually input line-item invoice details at the restaurant’s back office or accounting system.
Instead, adopting automated systems can help make inventory management faster and more cost-effective because it frees staff to spend more time on other essential processes.
Taking this example further, technology can automate alcohol invoice payments with distributors, and integrated services can integrate invoice data without any further human entry required.
Platforms like Quickbooks, Restaurant365, and Compeat, among other back-office systems, can be significant money-saving tools for restaurants while maintaining a quality of service that retains customers in the long term.
4. Enhanced Analytics
Many restaurants have to constantly monitor important metrics like profit per cover (PPC), and cost of goods (COG) in their bottom line to ensure balanced budgets throughout growth periods and periodical dips in diners.
Adopting analytical insights can be a budget-friendly way to maintain your flow of customers without relying on costly services like OpenTable, and platforms like Sage Intacct stand as an example of how you can utilize self-service dashboards to compare performance through departments in a single overview.
With data instantly distributed throughout specific departments or individuals on schedules, every team player can be kept in the loop to keep on top of revenue flow and make adjustments whenever needed.
These insights can help you sell more of your most desirable dishes and which opportunities for offers and specials you can utilize to maximize the value of your guests. With these data-driven analytics, you can upsell more effectively and upgrade the customer experience alongside your revenue.
Better Experience on a Budget
The experience of your diners will always be the most important factor in running a sustainable restaurant. While OpenTable is an exceptional tool for driving convenience for your guests, it can come at a significant financial cost to your business.
Fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives that can excel in more ways to help keep your diners feeling valued while protecting your bottom line. At the heart of the next generation of customer experience will be data-driven insights and fintech innovation, and moving to accommodate these technologies today can help you to prepare better for tomorrow.
