With the popularity of dining out comes the numerous ways for consumers to find restaurants
and book reservations. Restaurants have made it more convenient to reach customers, ensuring
the perfect morning, afternoon or evening dining experience. However, what we don’t see is the
behind-the-scenes components that can make this seemingly easy process turn into
miscommunication or a double booking nightmare.
Unlike other industries that use booking systems, like hotels and airlines, restaurants lack a
central system that updates inventory in real time no matter where you book your reservation. As
a result, this makes the job of a host far more complicated. Instead of having table availability all
in one place, they have to jump from app to app or even from device to device to determine
which tables are reserved and which ones are available to customers walking in for a
spontaneous dining experience. Some host stands are crowded with two or three iPads at once,
Joel Montaniel, co-founder and CEO of SevenRooms, said in an interview with Fast Company.
Channel Connect eliminates this issue by syncing reservation data into one concise platform for
restaurants. Whether a booking originates from a reservation app, a Google search, the
restaurant’s own website, a social or review site, a hotel concierge or even an AI booking agent,
the desktop tool routes it into whichever system the restaurant already treats as its source of
record. Since rival platforms rarely connect to one another directly, the software works through
the data-export tools and login credentials a restaurant already has, rather than any special
integration.
“More tables for diners, one book for restaurants,” Montaniel said in a video news
announcement.
Montaniel also emphasizes that this software is not directly intended to drive new paid business,
and restaurants don’t have to use SevenRooms to take advantage of this software. Offered free
under an open license, it is instead promoted as a useful tool that solves an industry-wide issue.
SevenRooms, which is owned by DoorDash, says restaurants maintain control of customer data
and decide who else can access it.
The launch lands amid intense rivalry among SevenRooms, OpenTable and Resy. In April,
OpenTable began requiring restaurant clients to make it their primary reservation system, a
policy Channel Connect appears designed in part to counter. Supporters see promise as
SevenRooms points to a DoorDash survey in which just over four in five operators said better-
connected systems would help their bottom line, along with early users who reported spending
less time wrangling reservations and running into fewer overbookings.
If the approach catches on, it could nudge the reservation business toward the kind of shared,
interconnected model that hotels and airlines have used for years, easing a long-standing
complaint among operators that each new tool tends to add complexity rather than remove it. It
also arrives as AI booking agents begin entering the picture. How restaurants juggle those
emerging channels alongside the established ones may end up being the real test of whether a
single “book” can keep pace with an industry that keeps adding new ways to reserve a table.
