OpenTable has announced some changes to its Client Agreement, effective April 16, including the requirement that restaurants make the platform their “system of record” for reservations, table and guest management, while also making all of their inventory available on OpenTable’s marketplace.
OpenTable is the most popular reservation system used in the United States, and is used by more than 60,000 restaurants globally. The company said that “many” restaurants are already using OpenTable as their system of record, but that the new rule applies it to everyone, even though it is not clear how the policy changes will be enforced.
“By extending our System of Record standard to all partners, we are ensuring a single source of truth that protects guest and restaurant data, maintains real-time availability, and guarantees that when a guest books a table, it actually exists,” OpenTable said in a statement to Restaurant Business. “There has been an increase in the prevalence of unauthorized parties, who in some cases have been encouraged by our direct competitors to bypass technical controls or scrape data without permission,” the company said. “These unauthorized bad actors pose significant risk to the safety and stability of OpenTable’s system, and therefore to all of our restaurant partners.”
For companies using multiple reservation systems in various markets, this change may have operators deciding whether to overhaul their setup options to make OpenTable the primary reservations system or to potentially abandon the platform.
Beyond the operational labour these changes may require, some operators are objecting to the practice that new restaurants will only have seven days to verify IP addresses to access guest data, or it will be obscured. As well, restaurants only have the opportunity for one-time data imports when onboarding to prevent duplication.
The benefits of the changes include consolidating data from various sources to protect against “bad actors” and unauthorized data sharing and deeper insights, CRM capabilities, and automated tools, courtesy of OpenTable’s Global Guestbook.
According to an email from OpenTable directed to Restaurant Dive, “The move is meant to make OpenTable a “single source of truth that protects guests and restaurant data, maintains real-time availability, and guarantees that when a guest books a table, it actually exists.”
