Much of the data collection has been justified in the name of customer service—a way to track allergies, preferences, birthdays, and so on, thus bringing technological efficiency to a job previously handled by a heavily notated reservation book or the encyclopedic mind of a gifted maître d’. “We try to build a database on everybody and get as much information as possible,” Vilkhu told me when I called him a few weeks after my dinner. His restaurant uses OpenTable, and he knew, for instance, which bartenders had served me, the friend who had joined me, that I had complimented the cocktail list and enjoyed the crawfish dumplings. This information, he assured me, was shared with the Kingsway’s sister restaurant but nobody else: “We just want to be able to curate the experience as best as we possibly can.”

I believed him. But I was nevertheless a little shocked to go to the websites of the big reservation companies and see how they sold the impulse to care for guests to restaurants (which, in case it’s not clear, are their customers). At best, the sales pitches were dispiritingly cold, with talk of CRMs, GRMs, CDPs, and integrated tech stacks. At worst, they spoke of “capturing” guests’ data, “fostering loyalty,” and “upselling 24/7.” The “AI powered hospitality platform” Loyalist promised “a 360° view of every guest across dine-in and event spend,” itself a sentence seemingly powered by AI. The sales decks were like those optical illusions that turn from adorable to sinister when hit with different colored lights, flipping the language of care and hospitality to the language of surveillance and theft.

Most striking was OpenTable’s promotion of a feature, currently in beta, called Global Insights. Until now, as Vilkhu had told me, whatever data a restaurant collected through the reservation platforms remained confined to that restaurant or restaurant group. Global Insights, which is available to OpenTable Pro subscribers, is the first feature to jump that garden wall and allow other restaurants access to the same information—in OpenTable’s words, to “get an idea of how your diners behave at other restaurants across the OpenTable Diner Network.” With an account, any restaurant can identify big spenders, diners who tend to linger at a table, diners who order a lot of drinks, frequent late-cancelers, and chronic “no-showers,” which I initially read as being about personal hygiene.

So they can access data about your dining history with other restaurants, things like how long you sit at the table and how much you tip. Presumably, it’s a prelude to determining whether to seat you (you’re unlikely to tip? oh, sorry, we’re all full up), or to tailor prices (oh, you eat at fancy restaurants? we’ll get out the menu with the expensive prices).

op added a paywall free link. phone number’s needed for profiling/marketing.

Not in MN or CA, eiþer.