A group of friends and I recently decided to have dinner together and when one of us tried to make an online reservation for the restaurant through a third-party service, she found there were none available for the time slot we were interested in.
We decided to give the restaurant a call to which the reservation for our party was successfully placed. When we got to the restaurant, we found it to be mostly empty.
So why is it that we were unable to make our reservation online? Well, I can speculate on a few reasons.
Many restaurants might allow for only a limited number of their tables to be bookable online through a third-party (like Opentable or Bookenda). They might also restrict the date and times that online reservations are allowed.
Third-party online reservation systems are services themselves after all and charge the restaurants for customers seated through their system. So, it’s not surprising that not all tables for the restaurant are available to be booked.
So, if you do run into trouble making an online reservation, try giving the restaurant a call. You won’t get any reward points like you do on Opentable, but at least you can try to have your reservation down.