TripAdvisor's mantra is "Speed wins." So it's unsurprising that the user-generated giant has already digested its acquisition of European restaurant booking platform lafourchette, which it purchased in May.
The site has been quick to integrate lafourchette's inventory of more than 13,000 European restaurants into its platform.
Today TripAdvisor pulled off the cover of Instant Reservation, a new tool that lets users book tables at participating restaurants seamlessly, similar to the company's Instant Booking service for participating hotels.
Before today, TripAdvisor users who picked a restaurant on the site were sent off to lafourchette for booking. Now users remain within the TripAdvisor interface.
At first Instant Reservation will only be available for the approximately 13,000 restaurants in France, Spain, Switzerland, and Belgium on the lafourchette platform.
But eventually all of the 2.3 million restaurants worldwide on TripAdvisor's platform will be encouraged to participate.
The company's move also places it in direct competition with OpenTable, the world's largest online booking platform for restaurants, which is in the process of being acquired in an all-cash transaction of $2.6 billion by online travel giant Priceline.
Complicating matters, TripAdvisor does work with OpenTable, MyTable, and other reservation platforms. It provides a service similar to Instant Reservation for OpenTable, but the lafourchette integration is different in that allows diners access to special offers, and the opportunity to see alternative dining times and restaurants within the TripAdvisor platform.
How it works
Visit a TripAdvisor's city page and click on Restaurants. Users are able to search for availability and reserve a table for a specific date and time from TripAdvisor.
After a restaurant booking is confirmed, users will receive an email confirmation co-branded with lafourchette (also known as ‘theFork’ and ‘eltenedor’) and, eventually (though not as of today) TripAdvisor. The reservation itself will be handled by lafourchette. Diners can easily cancel a reservation by following a link in the confirmation email.
Each user who books a restaurant via TripAdvisor and honors his or her reservation is invited to give a ranking of their experience.
This feeds into the average restaurant rating, which is an equally-weighted average of the scores given by tables for the previous 12 months.
Seamless booking, such as staying within TripAdvisor to complete a transaction, is a user experience that is heavily touted in the mobile space, because users are said to dislike being directed to secondary websites that may not be mobile-optimized or familiar-looking.
TripAdvisor says it has added Instant Reservation across its apps (iPhone and Android), desktop and mobile web for TripAdvisor English-speaking and Spanish-speaking sites, and in Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Staying hungry
TripAdvisor's move helps shift it away from being a tool just for out-of-town travel to being one for day-to-day utility locally.
As noted before, in its Q1 earnings, TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer described the restaurant segment as “extremely under-penetrated”.
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