Open Table from the restaurant's point of view

The reservation service is a mixed bag of good and bad, says Angeli's Evan Kleiman on her KCRW blog. The Open Table interface helps restaurants keep track of their tables — that's good.

I believe that a lot of the reservations we get through open table aren’t “incremental” eg, folks who wouldn’t have found us without OT. I think that once a regular customer who uses open table makes a reservation through OT, they no longer do so by phone to us. So they have become a no profit customer to us.

I also feel trapped. It is definitely true that our weekends have become busier since we signed up with OT. The fear is if we leave, will we continue to get those people or will their eyes, accusomed to seeing Angeli on their OT page just not realize it’s not there?