Picture the scene: It's late at night during the festive season and the local restaurants are packed to the gunnels. Once this would have been a signal to declare the evening a bust and begin wending your weary way home. Today, thanks to the humble mobile handset, you are only a few button-clicks away from locating the only spare seat in town.
Restaurant IT company Quadranet has launched a new service, Livebookings .co.uk, which offers users real-time access to the reservations ledgers of the hottest boites. Unlike existing online booking operations that provide only a static, preselected allocation of tables, the system supplies surfers with an up-to-the-minute assessment of what's available where.
"Consumers are unhappy with the allocation system provided by services such as lastminute.com because the tables on offer are limited to times that the participating restaurants know they will be empty anyway," says Quadranet MD Ken Stratford. "With live bookings, it's about finding a space whenever you want it." In addition to a traditional website, users can access the system via a high-end GPRS mobile phone or PDA on which a small piece of software is stored.
Using this as an interface in which they can store details of favourite eateries and reduce the reservation process to a mere three clicks, the surfer connects to the Livebookings servers to check availability. If the first choice is full then the system recommends others in the same area that do have room. At the restaurant end, the ma¿tre d' connects a PC containing the restaurant's booking system to the central server, thus ensuring details are kept as current as possible. Quadranet claims to have in excess of 700 registered users, from as far away as New York. The system has no commercial allegiances and is intended to become the eating business's neutral bookings infrastructure, much like the Sabre system for airline tickets used by the online travel industry.
The Conran and Fish chains have been among the first to take the system, with more establishments signing up daily. Once it has proven the restaurant facility as a useful working model, Quadranet's intends to expand the concept to golf courses, clubs and other parts of the leisure industry.
"Livebookings offers an opportunity to take the restaurant industry's involvement with the web a great step forward," says Karen Hanton of Toptable .co.uk, an online eating portal that recently adopted the system. "It will always be limited by the number of establishments prepared to make the necessary investment, but does provide them with an exciting and immediate marketing channel."
Quadranet claims the system is currently being used to take as many as 5% of the total bookings in some participating restaurants, believing it to rise to 20% by 2005. Further leaps in the technology are expected. The company has already developed location-specific services capable of identifying a user's precise location and presenting them with a list of nearby establishments that have seats ready and waiting, expected to come online early next year.
"For years, they have said that if you wanted to get the best table in town at short notice you had to be either a national celebrity or on first-name terms with the head waiter," says Stratford. "Soon, all you'll need to know is which button to press."
