CCs aren't stolen that often (usually it is the numbers that are stolen) so it would be pretty difficult to actually pick up the reservation, assuming the restaurant is smart enough to demand that the CC be shown when the diner show up.
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.
I resent the idea that someone who genuinely wants a dinner reservation but has to write a bot in order to get one isn't an "honest" diner. How is that any worse than refreshing all day waiting for a spot to open up?
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.
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.
Totally agree that using this to book reservations that you don't intend to keep is unfair and harmful. I see this, though, less like hiring handicapped person to jump the line and more like having your friend save you a spot.
I agree with the people that say charge a convenience fee. That would discourage the unfair behavior and still let people who actually intend to keep their reservation secure a spot.
It doesn't mention if the automated reservation takers are then trying to 'sell' them in other forums. I'm wondering if there is a motive there or not. There is a similar problem with getting camp site reservations even though there are charges for cancellation.
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.
Given the low margins on restaurants they could clearly benefit economically by having a 'cost' reserved table, which is to say for $x you can sit down right now vs wait in the regular queue. Of course it would be interesting to plot tips from people who paid extra for rapid seating vs those who waited.
For context on this, Gothamist recently posted this article about a company that "pre-books" reservations at hard to get restaurants. Customers pay $1,000/year for the privilege and then $45/$90 on top for especially hard to get reservations.
In other words, companies are starting to farm restaurant reservations to sell them, similar to the way that the market for event tickets has been corrupted.
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.
Restaurants are such a fickle business anyway. Surprised they don't just auction off reservations to the highest bidder and cut out the middleman, while they're still trendy.
Could the restaurants require an account to be created, limit the number of reservations one account can make, and check that people aren't multi-accounting from the same ip address?
The bots could get around this with proxies, but it would seem to be a pain to set up that many proxies.
Maybe there's a space in the market for someone to solve this problem for the restaurants.
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.
>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.
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 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.
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.
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).
This blog posts offers absolutely nothing new relative to what was in Diogo's original post [0] and accompanying previous discussion [1]. In fact it offers less since it doesn't include the original scripts Diogo used.
I (and I'm sure many others) would love it if there were some way for moderators to aggregate all upvotes for related articles that don't offer substantial new information or commentary on the original article instead.
It's pretty clear that a lot of journalists troll HN and related sites, find human interest stories that strike a nerve with the HN community, then write a blog post rehashing the same content without really adding anything new. It's a simple recipe for getting karma and page views that cheapens the experience here on HN. This type of journalistic pablum should not be rewarded with karma or attention.
If a restaurant can be fully booked sixty days in advance,they aren't goign to care who's making the reservations, as long as butts are in seats and bills get paid at the end of the meal.
46 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 25.9 ms ] threadThe siliconbeat.com article here just seems to be a reblog/summary.
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 agree with the people that say charge a convenience fee. That would discourage the unfair behavior and still let people who actually intend to keep their reservation secure a spot.
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/)
Article: http://gothamist.com/2013/08/02/wealthy_foodies_can_buy_hard...
The Gothamist article came from this Food Republic article: http://www.foodrepublic.com/2013/07/30/man-gaming-new-york-c....
In other words, companies are starting to farm restaurant reservations to sell them, similar to the way that the market for event tickets has been corrupted.
The bots could get around this with proxies, but it would seem to be a pain to set up that many proxies.
Maybe there's a space in the market for someone to solve this problem for the restaurants.
>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.
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.
Anyway, they're just entering your details into a system not unlike OpenTable. Why serialize this process into a conversation over a phone line?
"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.
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".
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.
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).
I (and I'm sure many others) would love it if there were some way for moderators to aggregate all upvotes for related articles that don't offer substantial new information or commentary on the original article instead.
It's pretty clear that a lot of journalists troll HN and related sites, find human interest stories that strike a nerve with the HN community, then write a blog post rehashing the same content without really adding anything new. It's a simple recipe for getting karma and page views that cheapens the experience here on HN. This type of journalistic pablum should not be rewarded with karma or attention.
[0] https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161
Yes some may be able to use a few extra ips, but to win they would need access to thousands of them, which is far more difficult.