Call Josh Wolkon a late, but now enthusiastic, adopter of reservations technology. His 9-year-old Vesta Dipping Grill is consistently listed as the No. 1-booked Colorado restaurant at OpenTable.com. “Our clientele base is Internet savvy, I’d guess,” he said.
However, if it wasn’t for the insistence of his managers, his team would still be answering phones and entering reservations by hand.
“They had to talk me into using OpenTable. There are a lot of products out there designed to take money out of the restaurant owner’s pocket. I waited to see which online reservation service won the war,” he said.
Wolkon decided to try it for a year. “Now, I think it’s great. We have a phone message that directs customers to make reservations online.”
Wolkon admits to the error of his ways. “In retrospect, I was proven wrong and I’m man enough to admit it. Listen, everybody wants to eat at 7:30 or 8 p.m. on a Friday. Everyone would show up at once and get seated at once. It was hard to control the flow of the food and service. Now they will make reservations earlier or later and don’t have to stand around for two hours in the bar.”
In January alone, Wolkon said Vesta Dipping Grill received reservations for 479 “covers” (or diners) directly through OpenTable.com, and 1,020 through Vesta’s Web site, which routes diners to OpenTable.
“The January monthly report also tells me that 52 percent of those customers were first-time diners and that the average dinner ticket was $40 (per person),” he said.
“It really has made a difference. If you take reservations, you almost have to use it.”
That’s not to say that OpenTable has no quirks and problems.
“We’ve had situations where someone tries to make a reservation on a night when we are booked solid and the system offers the next available reservation, which may be the next day or the next week. Sometimes diners don’t look closely enough and show up on the wrong day. That happened on Valentine’s Day. It was tough.”
Diners are not charged to use OpenTable, at least not directly. Restaurants pay a monthly fee to the company, plus $1 for every reservation made through OpenTable.com and 25 cents if made through the restaurant’s Web site. For Rioja, OpenTable costs an average of $600 a month, Gruitch said.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/dining/article/0,2792,DRMN_24_4622495,00.html
