The way we make restaurant reservations is changing. Or at least it's about to, ifNick Kokonashas anything to do with it.
Kokonas, 46, is the co-owner of three Chicago restaurants —Alinea, NEXT, and the cocktail-focusedThe Aviary— that are nearly as recognized for their business innovations as their culinary ones. When Kokonas and chefGrant Achatzopened Alinea ten years ago, they changed the way Americans think about dinner through the type interactive, technique-heavy food that's become trendy at top restaurants around the country.
But it was the company's proprietary tickets-based reservation system that was developed for the opening of NEXT that really captured the attention of people outside of the food world and signaled a potentially dramatic shift in the way restaurants do business.
The concept is simple. Diners pay for dinner at Alinea and Next in full when they make a reservation, which they refer to as a "ticket." At The Aviary, a $20 deposit that goes toward your bill acts as your ticket. This is all done through stand-alone reservation sites for each restaurant, not through a single hub.
Ticket prices fluxuate depending on the day and time of a reservation. During this particularly brutal winter, for example, prices at Alinea hovered around the $185 to $235 mark, depending on the night of the week. Kokonas says cold weather leads to a slower dining room, hence the lower price to incentivize people to buy tickets.
It's that last part that represents the biggest shift in thinking. Diners are accustomed to paying for what they order a la carte or a fixed price for a tasting menu. They're not used to dynamic pricing.
"People are are willing to buy a seat for a sports game, with pricing anywhere from $10,000 to sit on the court to $35 for the nosebleeds," explains Kokonas. "No one gets to the game and goes, 'man, that's totally unfair—that guy way up there got in for $35 and I had to pay $10,000."
But not all restaurants have the capacity to develop their own reservations program (Kokonas wouldn't discuss specifics, but did say a publicly traded company offered "seven figures" to buy it and bring him on as an employee). But now, Kokonas is trying to ensure that they don't have to by developing a version of the program to license on the open market.
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For over 15 years, one company has held a monopoly on the online reservations business—Opentable．虽然它没有,te reached the status of company-name-as-verb that brands like Xerox or Kleenex have, it's just as ubiquitous.
When it was founded in 1998, Opentable's main innovation was providing the necessary software, hardware, and support so restaurateurs and their staff weren't required to set up or maintain equipment and the monitors used on the dining room floor were touchscreen—an improvement on and a replacement for the "pen and paper reservation book" (a fact that Opentable still touts on its website).
But with the advent of cloud-based computing and the decline in prices for touchscreen technology, Opentable's hardware and support systems advantage has largely disappeared. So why would a restaurant still use the service?Accordingto the company, "Opentable helps fill more seats." Because of Opentable's brand status, consumers have traditionally thought of it as the primary source for reservations. When faced with the question of "Where do I eat tonight?", a diner might scour Opentable's database for a restaurant based on various factors (cuisine, price, time available).
That was how things worked at the turn of the century. Now, consumers have more resources for finding out where to eat than they know what to do with. Social media and the rise of the chef/restaurateur as publicist/marketing executive has leveled the playing field and made it easier than ever to achieve brand awareness (the page for NEXT has over 62,000 followers on Facebook, where most of the restaurants last-minute tables are booked).
So what are restaurants left with? A very expensive reservations system. Opentable's equipment set-up fee is $1,295, plus a monthly service fee of $199. But where Opentable makes most of its money and has been heavily criticized, is with a per-reservation service fee. If a reservation is made through Opentable's website the company collects $1 per reservation, while the restaurant is charged $0.25 per reservation if the diner books through the restaurant's website.
What's that translate to? Let's say a restaurant that's open 360 days a year and has an average of 100 reservations on the books per night gets 75% of its customers from Opentable. That restaurant pays nearly $30,000 a year to the booking giant.
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Outside of his own restaurants, three eateries around the country have quietly used variations on Kokonas' software over the past two years—Trois Mecin Los Angeles, Chicago'sElizabeth, and, for their rooftop restaurant last summer,The NoMadin NYC.
Of three, Trois Mec's use of the system has probably been the most publicized. While the restaurant is one of only a few traditional restaurants in Los Angeles to serve only tasting menus, it was the first to employ the tickets reservation system. According toVinny Dotolo, who operates the restaurant along with Animal co-ownerJon Shookand chefLudo Lefebvre, it's worked. "It's really been a huge success for us," explains Dotolo.
For the extremely small Trois Mec, which serves about 30 covers a night, cancellation rates were a real concern.
"At Animal, we run at about a 15% no-show rate, but we're able to refill those tables with walk-in business," says Dotolo.
Trois Mec offers a fixed menu at fixed times and is located in a strip mall—basically, walk-in business isn't an option. If a reservation doesn't show up at a restaurant of Trois Mec's size, a business with an already razor-thin profit margin loses the profit from that table. Dotolo says tickets have been a key to the restaurant's success: "The tickets system has made it so we've had literally 19 or 20 people not show up the whole time the restaurants been open."
When Trois Mec's staff logs onto the software, they do so from any device with an internet connection (Internet Explorer is the only exception—"Too many security flaws," says Kokonas). The site is clean and simple to use and appears exactly as it does to customers, except with administrator permissions. The entire thing is hosted on Amazon's servers, which Kokonas says makes the service infinitely scalable, so the system could handle "a million people" logging on at once.
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The other key differentiating factor is what Kokonas calls the systems "transparent inventory," which means that all available tables are presented in place.
"Opentable and SeatMe say no to customers a lot," says Kokonas. "People say I want 7PM for 4 people and they will say there is nothing within two hours of that."
According to Kokonas' research, a significant percentage of people pick up the phone and call the restaurant at that point because it's widely known that some restaurants don't list their entire reservations book online.
In Kokonas' world, every restaurant sells tickets for diners. "I was talking to this guy the other day who owns a pub who said 'there's no way anyone is going to buy a ticket to my pub.' " Kokonas thinks he's wrong. "He's not thinking about dynamic pricing or a way to offer value," reasons Kokonas. "Just charge less on slower nights, give them a discount—It's kind of like Groupon without the stigma of Groupon."
The reality? Probably a combination of the two systems. Restaurants want to and should be able to control their own booking systems without being tethered to a company like Opentable. And the per reservation charge—the most common complaint from business owners about the service— equates to something like charging for postage on an email. So far, Opentable hasn't had a reason to change its model—there's been no serious competitor in the space.
这将改变当Kokonas释放他的软件e "by the end of the year." So far, it doesn't have a price, name, or firm release date. Kokonas says there will be a small fee ("a couple of hundred dollars per month") and no per reservation charge. It won't appear as a widget on the restaurant's website, but instead will be custom-designed and integrated into the existing design. And restaurants will have full control over pricing and the ability to choose when they offer tickets—either exclusively or just for special events and high traffic evenings.
But one thing is for sure—Kokonas is confident. "With airlines, sports, and theaters, this is the way they do it," says Kokonas. "We are building this out in what I consider to be the right way."
