>but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?
Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.
With a website that has a table reservation system you don't have to get interrupted by the phone all the fucking time by people when you're trying to chop onions or set tables.
Ordering apps handle that nowadays, it seems routine for restaurants have have multiple apps on multiple devices as their intake.
You're only seeing this in the perspective of a customer. Ordering apps take a huge chunk of the tiny margin restaurants have. Smart owners put up their own ordering system instead.
Dine-in restaurants that are on the fancier side sometimes have that. I know US is phone call adverse but phone call appointments and bookings via talking to a real person rule here. Austria is very old school both in terms of service offerings and in consumer behavior (cash based, tech adverse, etc)
Each person who makes their reservation or take out order online is one less phone call to interrupt the work in the restaurant. So even if you get just half of the people to book online, that's still a great improvement.
And restaurants very commonly have events, either private events closing the place for other guests, or public events with a lot of people wanting to book. In these cases an online platform is even more useful. Then you remove a whole lot of calls.
>Each person who makes their reservation or take out order online is one less phone call to interrupt the work in the restaurant.
What makes you think old school restaurants care about that levels of efficiency and optimisations? If they did, they'd all optimize everything till they all become become mcdonalds.
It's in the part you quoted: They don't want to be interrupted by phone calls while they are working. Because they are very busy with other stuff. People working in restaurants are always on their feet doing something.
Taking online orders helps them ease a bit of a burden without having any negative effect for the customer experience.
Someone from the staff still needs to regularly check and apply the online booking or cancellations because waiters are not autonomous robots where the booking system beams the info their brain(yet). It doesn't remove any friction you're just replacing interrupt driven phone calls with the internet driven polling and calling this radical innovation.
I've worked for some years in restaurants. Guess what everybody hates? Having their work interrupted by phone calls.
Would you like to have your work interrupted all the time by phone calls?
Today I consult for restaurants and help them get their web presence and the reservation systems they need on their websites. They are very happy for this.
A restaurant usually has their booking calendar open on a display that all the chefs and waiters can check when they walk by. The system doesn't need any human to "apply" reservations or cancellations.
And there is a big difference between being interrupted to take bookings, or checking bookings when you have down-time. But thank you for your hacker sarcasm.
Guests usually call during the day to book tables for the evening or for another evening. In the afternoon between lunch and dinner, there is more time for staff to check bookings. Instead of answering the phone in the middle of morning prep or lunch service.
Then there's events. A venue can have public events with hundreds or thousands of participants. Usually during high season. So now you'd have that additional burden of phone calls, which becomes completely impossible unless you hire additional staff to only take calls. Or you have your own online system which is available 24/7 for customers to make and even pay for their bookings.
Third party reservation systems take anything from 15%-25% to do it for you, which is not really great for the restaurant, compared to buying their own system.
Or if it's an online system for take-away orders or deliveries, these get sent directly to the kitchen ticket printer.
And it's the same for the other small business category: accommodation. The best thing they can do is have their own online booking systems. To increase sales, reduce burden on staff, and reduce expenses to third party providers. And give customers a better experience.
Table reservations are only for fancy restsurants.
And non-fancy restaurants have take-away orders or delivery orders, which also benefit from online bookings.