Since it launched in 2014, Reserve has often been described as a “dining concierge” — which sounds cool but also maybe a little vague. Basically, the company combines a flexible reservation system with payments.
Now Reserve is ready to do more, with the launch of something called Reserve for Restaurants. Peter Esmond, the company’s head of restaurant product, described this as a table management service — an industry term for products (like those offered by OpenTable) that Esmond explained as “an operational tool to manage the guest experience from beginning to end.”
In Reserve’s case, that means that in addition to just managing reservations, the system also includes a customer database, so restaurants can keep track of someone’s preferences and allergies across visits, and even across restaurants in a larger group or chain.
And on the reservation front, Reserve is launching a new Reserve.com so you can now make reservations on the web (not just from your smartphone), and it’s also offering an embeddable widget so restaurants can offer reservations on their own websites.
Reserve for Restaurants will cost $99 per location per month, with the company completely getting rid of its $5 per-reservation fee.
“We want to be aligned with our restaurant partners,” CEO Greg Hong said. “With that the alignment comes a better pricing structure — a flat fee for restaurants to use our table management product. You can have an unlimited amount of reservations and that’s the same flat fee.”
Reserve was launched out of Expa, the startup studio whose partner Naveen Selvadurai will be speaking on-stage at Disrupt NY at 11:30am Eastern today.