Brillian Technologies

A nice article was published in Investors Business Daily regarding the progress OpenTable has made in the last 12 years since it was founded. That’s correct – it’s been twelve years since an online restaurant reservation network was conceived by OpenTable. It now has over 14,000 restaurant customers worldwide and has self-identified a target of 40,000 that take reservations North America. Surprisingly, of the almost 1M locations where you can order food in the USA today, less than 40,000 take reservations.

OpenTable has truly been an innovator in the restaurant and hospitality market. It pioneered linking online consumers to restaurants and in many cases was the driving force for restaurants to establish a decent web presence.  It continues to innovate by developing and rolling out new features for opentable.com (including diner reviews which has been the dominate value provided by a number of social network sites including Yelp!) and by acquiring companies (most recently Table Maestro, which manages “off-line” phone reservations). It is broadening its geographic footprint by targeting Europe which has been a tough market to crack.

OpenTable makes money a number of ways today, and with a growing consumer network (it sat over 15M diners in the last year), will have a number more options in the future. The company charges an upfront installation fee of $500 to $600 for its system and $199/month for use of its software. It charges $1 for every seat filled via its web site and 25 cents if it’s booked through the restaurant’s site.

Will most reservation-taking restaurants continue with “2 screens” at the host station – POS and Reservation/Table Management – or will the two eventually become one?