I recently discovered a new iPhone app called OpenTable, which lets you search for restaurants and place reservations right from your iPhone. I’m amazed I haven’t discovered this app prior to now; it’s certainly proved its usefulness in just a couple days on my iPhone.
As I was placing Valentine’s Day dinner reservations The Portland City Grill’s website this past weekend, I noticed a little button on the side of the web page with the recognizable “iTunes App Store logo.” Like a true iPhone junkie, I instinctively clicked on it to see what app they were linking to.
Sure enough, it loaded up iTunes and brought me to OpenTable’s app page. As the app was free, I immediately downloaded and installed it to see how it would stack up. Would I actually be able to check my favorite restaurants for open reservation times, while I’m out and about without having to call around?? That would be amazing!
After installing the app, and signing in with my OpenTable username and password (free to create on OpenTable’s website), I was brought to the app’s starting page.
Tapping on “Current Location” allows you to search for reservations for restaurants near you. Tapping on the “Select Location” lets you define where you want to search; useful for checking out dining options in another city.
Tapping on the “My Profile” tab on the bottom brings up a screen showing all of your active reservations currently pending in the system.
To view an active reservation, just tap on it and up pops some more detailed information, including the address of the restaurant, the phone number (which will place a call if you tap on it), the date and time of the reservation and for how many people it’s for, and several buttons to send an email (containing this same information) to someone else, get directions to the restaurant using the Maps app, or to modify or cancel or reservation.
To search for an available table at a restaurant, you’ll use the “Find a Table” tab along the bottom. You can search for available reservations by neighborhood, cuisine type, and by specifying a date and time, and party size.
OpenTable will display all available restaurants (that are in the OpenTable system) that have open reservations at or around the time you specified.
You can also refine your search, by specifying how much you want to spend, changing cuisine types, or even showing unavailable tables to request being added to a waiting list.
After selecting a restaurant, you’ll be able to choose your preferred time to book a reservation. One note to keep in mind, however, reservations may be filling up behind the scenes, even as you move around in the app.
Just because it shows an 8:30pm slot available, by the time you actually get around to tapping the button, that slot may have already been scheduled by someone else. This will tend to happen more frequently on holiday weekends or during special events.
OpenTable also lets you browse diner ratings and read reviews left by other diners.
You can even browse the menu (if the restaurant has chosen to make it available), though from my experience, the menus were not optimized to display on the iPhone’s small screen, requiring quite a bit of zooming and scrolling.
Overall, I’m quite impressed with OpenTable, and expect to get quite a bit of use out of it placing dinner reservations at area restaurants. Your mileage may vary, depending on how many places use OpenTable reservation system where you live, but most major metro areas in the US have at least dozens of popular restaurants listed.
The only complaint I’ll mention is that distances seem to be listed inconsistently. On restaurant detail screens, the distance may be listed as miles, which makes sense in the US. However, on search results, the distances are all shown as kilometers, which means I have to do math in my head to figure out how far away it is – not something I like doing. Having a setting to control mi/km or at least making it consistent would be a nice touch.
To get started using OpenTable, first head here to see if your favorite restaurants are listed, create your free OpenTable account, and then download the free app from the iTunes App Store here.
Continue reading:
- Everything New Apple Just Announced (Septembe
- Apple Watch Pre-Order
- Apple Research Kit launches with 5 Apps
- Apple TV now only $69
TAGS:
