The new way to eat out in London: Will restaurant booking apps
become the norm?
|A reserved table at The Brown Dog dining room Barnes
When it comes to booking a table at a restaurant, most people are familiar with the painstaking wait as the phone continues to ring, eventually answered by the muffled voice of a waiter shouting over laughing and chattering customers. You hope that they were able to strain enough to hear your name as you repeat it for the second time, and that your table really is secured for the busiest night of the week. But times are changing - at least for the many restaurant owners and frequent diners using reservation apps.
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With 52,805 restaurants in the UK, according to the latest figures from ONS, are reservation apps the solution to navigating London's food scene?
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AMBL Co-Founder and CEO Aaron Solomon entered a career in finance aged seventeen and fresh out of school. As his manager tasked him with booking same-day dinner reservations for clients, he noticed one consistent challenge.
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“It was just a nightmare. I remember looking online and not being able to find anything and I thought, it can't be this difficult to try and find a table,” he recalled, now 27 years of age. Solomon explained how the problem worsened during the coronavirus pandemic, and the rise in cancellations and no-shows led him to think about the technology restaurants used for reservations.
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With closures and limited opening hours, ONS figures show that the restaurants and mobile food services sub-industry was 74 percent below pre-pandemic levels from April to June of 2020.
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“How can they see that somebody like me wants a table? How can I not just broadcast out like on Uber?” he thought, before pitching the idea of a last-minute reservations app to a friend in the tech space - Jed Hackling, now co-founder of AMBL.
Launching in November last year, AMBL has reached 20,000 downloads and around 300 London restaurants that show available bookings to the hour, live on the app. The business makes one pound per head on every booking made through the app. It also features exclusive offers for users but these are decided by the restaurants themselves.
Amy Chen, a 21-year-old, one-time user of the first online reservation platform, The Fork, said she came across the app when searching for a discount at a popular hot pot restaurant in London.
The Fork was launched as a website in 2007, and later as an app in 2019, also providing its users with access to offers at restaurants. It has almost 60,000 partner restaurants across thirteen countries, but diners like Chen struggle to see its value beyond the discounts due to the selection being limited in many areas.
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Despite not being a fan of the app, Chen still prefers to book online. “On the phone, you can’t stop or edit what you have said, but when booking online, you get a confirmation, so it’s very reassuring to know that it’s been approved,” she said.
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Confident in the future of reservation apps, Solomon explained how this has become the norm for retail and travel, specifically noting the success Uber; the second most downloaded app for travel in 2022, according to a Statista report from March this year.
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“I think that if you can make an app that is ubiquitous and easy for people to get what they want, they will start to use it and change their behaviour over time,” he said.
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Travel Blogger Tara Tadlock, aged 32, started using the OneZone app in April after returning to London from 9 months abroad, and has not stopped using it since.
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“You can sort through all its listings based on whether they're female-owned, vegetarian, etc. That makes it super easy to find a spot for a group dinner where people might have different dietary requirements,” she explained.
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Just like AMBL and The Fork, the two-year-old app also allows users to search on map view and save restaurants on their account – Tadlock’s favourite feature for finding those she might have forgotten about. The blogger rarely uses OneZone’s booking function, as the perks that come with the premium version – earning rewards per booking – are not worth the cost for her.
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While collecting information for this article, an Instagram story poll was sent out asking about people’s experience using reservation apps. From almost 50 responses from people between the ages of 18-30, only a tenth said they had one of these apps, with another tenth saying that they have considered it.
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Another user and Travel TikToker, 31-year-old Sham Isabella Smith, discovered the OneZone app during the pandemic as an easier way to find restaurants that were still open in London. She has since used it to find new restaurants opening across the city, comparing “the cuisine, theme, ratings and reviews”.
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“It’s also good to send links from the app to friends so they can have all the information for the restaurant without having to do their own research”, said Smith.
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Outside of OneZone, she frequently used the Google Maps app to find local restaurants and use the bookmark feature to keep them in one place.
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Italian Gastro-bakery, Soffice, heard about the benefits of The Fork app from international restaurants sharing the crossroad of constant traffic and pedestrians in Putney. Owner Guiseppe Tuttoilmondo signed up three months ago to gain more visibility in the first year of business, and was ready to go in a couple of weeks. o
He explained that The Fork takes a commission on the number of bookings obtained for a restaurant and invoice on a monthly basis.
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“I definitely saw an increase in bookings. Around fifteen percent more customers,” he said, after offering a twenty percent discount on the app for the first two weeks. Tuttoilmondo stated that they will review the success of this reservation platform in six months' time.
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Reservation solution company, Tablebook.me in Hertfordshire, have incorporated booking platforms such as The Fork, Resy and Quandoo to help store and manage information, as well as assisting their clients in setting these up themselves.
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The business has worked with restaurants for 12 years, reducing additional pressures from staff handling reservations and providing expertise.
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Director of Operations at Tablebook.me, Leanne Noakes, expressed, “hearing a ringing phone can ruin your restaurant experience. Equally, working in a restaurant balancing speaking to customers face to face and managing a phone can be difficult”.
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They now handle bookings of some of the most sought-after dining locations in London, such as Clos Maggoire and Benares. “At Tablebook.me, we are able to give good customer service as we have more time over both the phone and email,” she said.
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Nestled in a residential street in Barnes, The Brown Dog pub and dining room started using Resy as their primary reservation system around six months ago to reduce the pressures of taking bookings over the phone.
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“We have opening hours where we can’t always be here, so it’s just an easier way to get access to as many people as possible,” said supervisor Ellie Green, adding that the platform has given them lots more visibility. Green said that they still accept calls from customers for instances such as being fully booked but “the majority goes through the app”.
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Noakes stated that Tablebook.me is seeing more and more restaurants adopting Resy, which was launched as a hospitality technology platform and app in 2014. Over the last decade, she said she has seen an increase in email bookings and queries but noted that customers still value being able to call for additional queries or notes for their bookings.
“Third party booking platforms such as OpenTable, SevenRooms, DNM, Zonal offer messaging solutions through there platforms and consolidates the reservation process. This has been a new solution to the market and I can see that this will be the future of customer communications,” she said.
