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Comment by sehrope | Hacker News Reader

Besides the usual scaling they'll get from the larger org and cross marketing (e.g. I'm guessing people who book with OpenTable travel more than the average person), imagine Priceline combining its "name your own price" concept with OpenTable's inventory of restaurants to offer prix fixe meals. Pick an area of town, a type of food, headcount, and a max price and they match you with a restaurant that can accommodate.

Not sure if it's a workable idea (I honestly can't see myself ever using it) but it's an interesting angle to think about.

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It's also worth nothing that some ~90% of the Priceline group's revenue (iirc) is booked through Booking.com, which is one of the top travel sites in the world (and remarkably unknown in the US). Not everything Priceline does is the "name your own price" gig.

Interesting. We used booking.com extensively when travelling in Europe because most of the smaller hotels use it as their booking engine. (And we also heard lots of complaints that they didn't like using it, because the cut was too big... but they were still using it.)

Booking.com is the dominant player in Europe with something approaching 50% of all online hotel bookings going through them. They are unique in that they have tens of thousands of small hotels that use them exclusively as their booking engine and don't distribute to other online travel agencies.

Booking.com uses an agency model so the hotels pay them a commission that tends to be lower than the margin they share with Expedia and others on the merchant model. However, since Booking.com has so much leverage in the marketplace, they have started charging more for premium placement, etc. that hotels have to comply with if they want exposure to their massive audience.

That's a good idea for growth, might help them attract more price sensitive users who probably don't dine out as much as their average user.

We already tried this with groupon, resteraunt a have no benefit in attracting price sensitive customers aaas the margins are already so low

Groupon may not have lived up to the hype, but they're still putting millions of people in restaurants each year. And part of the reason they didn't live up to the hype is because their deals are a lot better for the merchant now (70% of revenue going to the merchant instead of 50%).

There is a definitely model and need for filling empty seats at a restaurant. It just has to be done profitably over the variable costs of food (significant) and additional labor (much less significant).

Yes and open table is already doing it. They reward repeat customers who pay full price (their point system) not try to generate new customers who are a poor fit for long term business by discounting their meals.

Discounts are for getting rid of excess merchandise, not acquiring new customers.

Restaurants do prix-fixe menus all the time.

That sounds like an automated version of various cities' Restaurant Week promotions, where participating restaurants offer promo prix fixe menus (sometimes all the same price, sometimes different price levels allowed).

Houston's was such a big hit that it's now Restaurant Weeks and lasts a whole month.

> Not sure if it's a workable idea

This was the first thing I thought of. I do think there might be a challenge convincing people that they should lock themselves into a restaurant (assuming it works the same way as with hotels) though.

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