OpenTable launched the first online booking system in 1998. However, not long after, it became evident that their booking allocation process using “Tables and Table Combinations” was inefficient and could easily reject bookings even when 35% to 40% of the tables remained empty.
The search for a better booking allocation solution was highlighted in 2001 paper published by the MIT Operations Research Magazine written by Dr Dimitris Bertsimas, Associate Dean for Business Analytics at the MIT Sloan School of Business and his PhD student, Romy Shioda, now a Managing Director of the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP Investments) where they wrote:
“Maximising efficiency is of utmost importance in order for large and popular restaurants to increase their profits and remain competitive”
Interestingly, their research did not seem to appreciate that small restaurants face the same issues and problems as large restaurants. Despite their desire to solve the problem they gave up and passed the problem to others by concluding a better solution could be achieved by:
“Extending our model to support dynamic capacity – that is, allowing restaurants to move their tables around to better accommodate the demand at each time”
Since then, there have been hundreds of other documented attempts to solve the problem by other professors, operational researchers, including thesis, patent applications by tech companies like Apple and entertainment companies like Disney that have tried to optimise bookings and to solve the dynamic allocation problem with just a fixed set of tables without success. That is without even considering any process to “move their tables”.
Despite the recognition that the booking allocation framework of OpenTable was wrong and inefficient other companies like SevenRooms, NowBookIt, Resy, Quandoo and Yelp all copied the same framework such that all these systems suffer from the same problems and they can all easily reject bookings when a restaurant is only 60% to 65% full.
It was the above failed attempts to create a better booking system that have resulted in WizButler being the first dynamic space optimisation booking system developed and why it has been awarded patents in the USA, Canada, India, Singapore and Malaysia (with other countries pending).
So, if you are a restaurant owner and manager that wants a booking system that can autonomously optimise the use of your space to maximise your bookings and revenue send me a DM and I would be happy to show you what is really possible.
More Bookings, More Customers, More Revenue for Less Cost. Happy Days!
Peter Petroulas
Inventor, Founder & CEO
(Judge, World Catering Technology Awards 2024, 2025, FoodBev UK)