Bots Gobble Up Restaurant Reservations in the Bay Area

Thank you for this! I read the entire article waiting for "Ok, so why do bots book all these restaurants. Be nice if the author had pointed out the economics behind it.

Temp CCs. There may or may not be money on it when the fee comes in..

If the people running this scheme are profiting from it, soon they'd start using stolen CCs.

If the customer actually wants the reservation that they are paying an automated service to secure, then neither of these proposed solutions will have any effect.

Original source, from the previous discussion: https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant...

The siliconbeat.com article here just seems to be a reblog/summary.

Many people feel uncomfortable having to talk to strangers on the phone. Plus the hassle of having to repeatedly spell out the details of your reservation when the person at the other end is in a busy and noisy restaurant.

It's a hassle because for popular restaurants it can either be a wait to get a hold of the maitre'd, and it's likely there are no reservations available in your parameters.

Which means calling a restaurant, waiting on hold, asking for your reservation, possibly not getting it, in which case you get to repeat the same for another restaurant.

For online systems the perk isn't really about not talking to a human, it's the ability to see availability at a glance so you only have to "call" once.

For not-insanely-busy restaurants where I know a seat is almost certainly available, I prefer calling. After all, their number is probably already in my address book, and making a phone call is a hell of a lot easier than diving through multiple pages on a shitty mobile browser.

When you call, someone at the restaurant looks up the info on opentable (or whatever system is used) then tells you the result of that search. It's quite convenient to look up this info online and even change make changes like reservation times.

I couldn't disagree more with this. Having to involve two actual people, who have to drop whatever else they're doing and complete a trivial transaction, which can probably only be done during business hours, is a problem just begging for a technological solution.

Anyway, they're just entering your details into a system not unlike OpenTable. Why serialize this process into a conversation over a phone line?

I think this is a symptom of the way kids have been raised in the last twenty years or so.

"Don't talk to strangers" extrapolates to letting mom and dad answer the phone. Plus, in the era of dial-up, nobody could use the phone while you were going on Neopets.

A surprisingly large subset of my peers (think Google, Facebook interns) are afraid of calling up a restaurant -- they have no idea what the social norms for using a telephone are because they've never been taught.

The restaurant might not be open. Or I might be at work. Or it could just be a busy night, and I want to see what's available without having to make multiple calls.

On top of that, I get a record of the transaction via email. If I call instead, I just have to take it on faith that the other person didn't mistype the reservation details or forget to hit "save".

Some possible hassles could be: waiting until the restaurant is open so someone answers the phone, being put on hold while they help another, going round and round with person on phone trying to find an open slot that works, making sure they heard your name, number in party, etc correctly.

Some people might want to see which restaurants have open reservations on a certain day, instead of calling around until they find one.

You've never phoned a restaurant and found they weren't answering their phone at the time?

As far as I can tell, restaurants in my area go from "too quiet to have anyone in to answer the phone" to "too busy for anyone to be free to answer the phone" and back without ever passing through a state in between.

Say I've got two groups of people and we all want to get dinner together. We agree on 7pm. I call up the restaurant, and they say that they don't have a reservation at 7 but they do have reservations at 6 and 9:30. I then need to coordinate with everyone else about these times, and maybe part of my group isn't with us, so we're texting or calling, at that point I guess I tell the agent at the restaurant that I'll call them back, etc etc. With the online solution we wouldn't even have agreed on 7, we would have pulled up the options immediately and started from there.

Speed is a big feature here too, as is the ability to easily switch between different restaurants quickly. The above actually happened, only we ended up looking through three different restaurants before finding one that we liked that we could get a reservation at a convenient time. If we'd been calling around it would either have taken a lot more of our time or we'd have settled on something that wouldn't have worked out as well (not to mention tied up restaurant employees during the lunch rush).

That was my reaction too. You see exactly the same thing with concert tickets and scalpers. It's supply and demand problem that venues want to use rationing because it increases cachet, but abritrageurs have an incentive to step in and resell for the "market" price.

I wonder if we'll see more Ticketmaster-style countermeasures on reservation sites soon.

Or more restaurants varying their prices for high- and low-demand times like Alinea in Chicago (https://www.alinearestaurant.com/website/welcome/)

It's probably frowned upon in the way that slipping a $20 to the bouncer to skip the line is. Or hiring someone on Craigslist to stand in line for a cronut. It creates an arms race for access, which some people find annoying.

One involves a human requesting a reservation in real time. The other does not.

I think it's because only a limited number of people have the ability to do so. There are probably a number of other methods of "cheating" in similar situations that would also be viewed poorly for the same reason. A few examples off the top of my head: hiring a handicapped person to let you skip lines at Disney, hiring a homeless person to hold your spot in line, bribing an employee, having your assistant spend all morning mashing F5 while you go about your day, and certainly many others.

The ones I named would be seen by many people as unfair because they are options that are only available to people with a great deal of money. Other strategies (like calling in a favor) are only open to those with influence and special personal connections. In this case, we have a strategy that is only open to individuals with highly technical skills.

Note that I'm not saying it is unfair to use any of these strategies. I think reasonable people could disagree on many of them and they are sensitive to circumstances.

In some sense, though, this can be seen as a market distortion. For you or I, writing a bot to do this might be pretty simple. Since we don't have to "pay" very much for the reservations, we would be likely to over-consume them, that is, to make more reservations than we intend to keep. We might even double-book ourselves so we have options (e.g. this morning I felt like steak, now I feel like seafood).

This is obviously bad for the restaurants, but it is also bad for other customers who might have wanted the reservations more than we did, but were unable to build a bot to get them because, years and years ago, they chose to study things other than computer science.

I have heard that some restaurants have started auctioning off a handful of their tables. Usually part of the proceeds go to charity I think?

You can't restrict based on IP address since there are scenarios where a group of machines will present the same IP address. It's also very hard to verify with other methods. They would have to take an approach similar to hotels or car rentals. Even then I don't think the problem is easily solved because if the demand is so great for these restaurants and the supply limited, charging or authorizing a payment ahead of time might not be much of a deterrent if the profits to be made are higher.

Just require a credit card to be used for the reservation, limit the number of reservation each cc can make and require it to be used to pay for the dinner - you can still reserve the seat and enjoy the food, but the resale value of the ticket is nothing.