OpenTable: New concierge answers questions about restaurants

Until now, OpenTable has mainly been used to book tables at restaurants, but it also provides information about them. Now AI is coming into play: the concierge is an AI assistant that can answer questions about restaurants. The booking platform is collaborating with Perplexity and OpenAI to provide this service. This is likely to create even more competition, especially for other review platforms.

The concierge can be consulted for questions about food and prices, reviews, and descriptions. In its announcement, OpenTable gives examples such as asking whether a restaurant has outdoor seating, whether it is too loud for a date, and what vegan dishes are available. This is practical because it means you no longer have to search for and read reviews.

The information comes from the restaurants themselves and from guests. However, the announcement does not clarify whether open information from the internet will also be accessed. The cooperation with AI providers suggests that this will be the case. OpenTable also collects reviews itself, but guests must be verified. This is to prevent fake reviews, which are a common problem with online reviews and cannot always be trusted.

The concierge is supposed to provide information on more than 60,000 restaurants. This actually covers only a small portion of the restaurant landscape. In Hanover, for example, only 162 restaurants are listed on OpenTable. The fact that a small restaurant in Minden is said to have been booked 30 times before 8 a.m. on a given day, as stated on the website, also makes the information seem questionable. Some booking platforms use such tricks to convince searchers.

Best practice: Reserve a table

Nevertheless, on the one hand, the concierge service is likely to save hungry diners the trouble of searching other platforms such as Google or Tripadvisor, which could put pressure on them. However, the same is already true of real-time searches by AI providers, as Perplexity itself and ChatGPT can also compile reviews and information about a restaurant on request.

On the other hand, increased use of OpenTable is likely to lead to more restaurants wanting to be represented on the platform. OpenTable has always been at the forefront of all relevant new AI features, for example when it was still believed that plugins and then GPTs would prevail for ChatGPT. Or when Google offered extensions for Bard.

Instead, AI chatbots themselves are becoming assistants that can reserve a table for you – and use the OpenTable API for this purpose, for example. However, future agents should also be able to fill out any other type of form on a website. In addition, Google Maps in the USA already questions to answer questions about locations and restaurants. – and book it right away.

Reserving a table at a restaurant is a recurring task when it comes to introducing new AI features. Initially, AI was supposed to take over the booking of an entire trip, including activities, but currently it is limited to tables.

(emw)