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Comment by toki5 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but this line bugs me:

>Using OpenTable, Urbanspoon or SeatMe , diners could see available time slots and make a reservation online or from their smartphone without the hassle of calling the restaurant, and know that their table would be secure.

How is calling the restaurant a hassle? Especially when the solution is to use your phone to look the restaurant up online?

Maybe it's the cranky old man spirit in me, but I call restaurants every time -- I hadn't even heard of these sites. I didn't know that this was a need people felt needed fulfilling.

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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 remember reading an article where an article lamented the inflexibility and poor UX of a system like OpenTable -- in the real world, people arrive early and/or late and so servers will dynamically shuffle table allocations to handle these changes. Apparently, the servers ended up just drawing on the monitor using a dry erase marker rather than trying to change the bookings in the computer.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

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