OpenTable Allows You to Order a Meal Globally with Multilingual Capabilities - Dispatch Weekly

Users of San Francisco based OpenTable can book reservations for 38,000 restaurants in its global network, by accessing the multilingual app that supports the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese.

The restaurant app used to be country-specific but this new development allows people to travel and eat with ease at a variety of places without being confined by language.

Booking a Restaurant in Any Location, Globally

An OpenTable spokesperson said:

“So Paris is currently a meaningful example as a traveler from French Canada who is traveling abroad, for example.”

“Another scenario is, if you’re from the U.S. and traveling to Tokyo, you can now book a restaurant in Tokyo in the English language/your preferred language. You wouldn’t need the Japanese version of the app to discover, book, and manage your reservation in that corresponding country.”

A Global Company with International Ambitions

The Priceline Group Inc. spent $2.6 billion in cash for the dining reservation service in June 2014.

Since then, the company has been working to make OpenTable more international, becoming an appealing option for culturally savvy travelers.

CEO Christa Quarles said that the changes meant that OpenTable’s websites and mobile apps can help the company become “a true ‘Global Dining Passport’ for diners across the world.”

At present the company manages 20 million reservations per month, to allow global jet-setters to use local accounts anywhere in the world.

97 Percent of Travelers Eat Out Once Daily

About 97 percent of travelers report eating out at least once daily, according to OpenTable research.

For much of the past two years, OpenTable has been improving the multiple of languages in nations where the idea of reserving a lunch or dinner table via web or mobile app is still considered strange.

While Americans are familiar booking a restaurant reservation online, that concept remains foreign in many other countries.

Expansion into Europe and Asia

Priceline’s former CEO, Darren Huston said, “Nobody books restaurants online,” adding, “a lot of plumbing had to be put in place.”

OpenTable also sells table management and payment tools that helps restaurants manage their tables, accept mobile payments.

They also offer digital gift cards, and it hopes that even more casual-dining restaurants that don’t rely on reservations may find interest in its software platforms.

“The core business itself is very healthy,” Huston said of OpenTable. “It’s profitable, it’s growing, there have been lots of good changes made. But really, we want OpenTable to be multiples of the size of what it is.”

Would you use the OpenTalk and in what countries would it be most useful to book a table?