WebProNews

Tag: reservation

  • Groupon And Savored Join Forces To Bring High-Class Dining To All

    Getting reservations for a restaurant is awful. It would be so much easier if we could just reserve our tables through an easy-to-use Web site. Oh wait, there apparently is a Web site that does just that, and Groupon just acquired the company behind it.

    Groupon announced today that they have acquired Savored, a Web site dedicated to high-class restaurant reservations. The site doesn’t deal exclusively in reservations though. They also offer discounts of up to 40 percent on all food and drink at said restaurants.

    The Savored team is going to help Groupon expand the offerings of its new Groupon Now! program. For those unfamiliar, Groupon Now! is a time-based deal where users can get a discount within a certain time slot. Savored already does this, but with high-class dining. It will be a nice compliment to Groupon’s current offerings at dozens of other restaurants in cities around the country.

    Existing fans of Savored may be concerned about the acquisition, but they have nothing to worry about. The process of booking a reservation will remain the same under Groupon. Even better, users can still book reservations through the Savored Web site.

    Unfortunately, Savored and Groupon Now! are still only available in select markets. With increased backing from Groupon, Savored may be able to expand into more cities. The Web site currently caters to large urban centers like New York City and Chicago. I’m not saying that Lexington is a big city, but we have our fair share of reservation-required dining that could use some Internet-based discount love.

    Of course, the far more pressing question is if Savored will make an appearance on the next episode of the Groupon Kidz Club. I can just imagine Roll being faced with the possibility that he may have to put down the croissant he’s always carrying.

  • Foursquare Partners with OpenTable

    The foursquare Blog just announced that its geolocation service has forged a partnership with OpenTable, the online real-time restaurant reservation platform. Essentially, foursquare users can access its Explore recommendation engine to research the restaurants of a specific locality, and then go on to book reservations with the new OpenTable integration. Below is a screen of the new interface:

    foursquare opentable

    Foursquare users can now make one-click reservations at over 25,000 major city restaurants in the U.S., and OpenTable is expanding. It’s as easy as clicking ‘make a reservation.’

    The San Francisco-based OpenTable was founded in 1998, and has since seated 280 million diners worldwide. The service is available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Japan, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. In February, the company announced the winners of the 2012 Diner’s Choice Award, listing the top 100 restaurants in the U.S.

    In related news, today foursquare announced that its users can now instantly verify their businesses for a small fee, instead of having to wait up to a month to register via snail mail.

  • How To Avoid Hotel Cancellation Fees

    How To Avoid Hotel Cancellation Fees

    The majority of hotels charge a fee for canceling a room reservation, if one cancels within 24 hours of their scheduled check in. This sort of thing typically isn’t an issue if one has a planned vacation or trip, and has ample time to adjust changes in plans. Still, for cancelled or re-routed flights, various emergencies, etc., a Redditor called drwired has come up with a quick solution – reschedule the room for a few days later than it was originally booked, then cancel outside of the 24 hour late fee window.

    Theoretically, this tactic should work – hotels mind less if a customer reschedules instead of cancels altogether, and will alter a reservation as long as it stays on the books. Once the date is moved ahead, one can just call back later, and hope to cancel with a different person at the desk. Perhaps it might help to wait a day or two before calling back, as many places keep logs concerning customer issues.

    Personally, I have never tried this trick, but I can recall times in the past where it would’ve been useful. Still, commentary on Reddit concerning the matter kind of makes me think that the tactic doesn’t really work very often.