SAN FRANCISCO -- An Internet company that offers restaurant
reservations is expanding with a service specifically for hotel
concierges.
OpenTable.com, which already offers consumers the
ability to make restaurant reservations on line at more than 600
restaurants in 13 U.S. cities, recently launched another on-line
product, OTconcierge.
The product offers the services of OpenTable, such as instant
on-line confirmation of reservations and a restaurant reservations
search engine, but also allows concierges to make, cancel, modify
and manage multiple reservations.
Participating restaurants will be able to distinguish between
hotel and other reservations and compile reports on the number of
reservations made by concierges.
As with OpenTable, the on-line reservations are made live in the
inventory of the participating restaurants, and they can be made
seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
The OTconcierge product is starting in San Francisco, Chicago
and New York, and is expected to expand to eight other cities by
the end of the year.
These cities are expected to be the eight other cities already
on the OpenTable network: Boston; Houston; Los Angeles;
Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; San Diego; Vail, Colo., and
Washington.
The San Francisco-based company is looking for other business
opportunities, including developing partnerships in the travel
industry.
The company is already partnered with America Online's Digital City, The
Chicago Tribune's Metromix.com and other media companies.
"Working with travel agents is definitely something we are open
to. It's a great idea. We're exploring all those avenues," said a
spokeswoman.
OpenTable is a service that can be used by travel agents to make
restaurant reservations, she noted, as part of a menu of services
agents offer their clients.
The company signs up restaurants, which pay a monthly fee to
participate and another fee based on the number of reservations
made through the on-line system.
Participating restaurants must have electronic reservation
books, which allow on-line access to live inventory.
The service is free to users through the OpenTable.com Web site
and to hotel concierges through the new on-line interface.
Hotel concierges are not paid by OpenTable to use the system, in
keeping with the concierge profession's code of ethics, said the
company spokeswoman.
In a beta-test with four hotel concierges in San Francisco, the
company found that the enhanced interface developed specifically
for concierges was useful because concierges make a high number of
reservations each day -- up to 65 in a day, according to the
test.