Zagat deal with OpenTable enables mobile restaurant bookings

When I was in San Francisco, I used OpenTable all the time. It’s a piece of brilliance. Every restaurant on the OpenTable books has OpenTable technology installed. They use it to manage all their restaurant bookings. There’s no faxing rubbish. No phoning.

You simply log on, find a restaurant, hunt for space and click ‘book’. Simultaneously that table you’ve just acquired is marked as reserved on the restaurant’s machine — so there’s no double booking and you get to walk straight in ahead of the queues.

Time and time again I wanted to do the booking by mobile.

Well Zagat, the well known restaurant guide, is the first to adopt OpenTable’s mobile booking system. And it makes a heck of a lot of sense:

“ZAGAT.mobi is the first mobile website to link to OpenTable’s new mobile service,” said Nina Zagat, Co-Chair of Zagat Survey. “ZAGAT.mobi is a one-stop shop for making informed dining decisions and then taking action.”

Zagat-Rated restaurants that are OpenTable partners will have a proprietary icon of a table and chair next to their phone number on ZAGAT.mobi which, when clicked, will open the reservation search box. OpenTable users simply choose a date, time and party size in order to find available tables and then make an instant reservation at the specified restaurant.

Done. That’s a winner! Remember zagat.mobi when you’re out and about. I’ll give this a go when I’m in San Francisco in September for CTIA.