(Not ) Honoring a reservation

Normally being part of the 5:30 dinner crowd, I had a new experience last night.

As I worked late Wednesday night, my wife and I planned to have dinner after sunset for the first time in a while. Somewhat unfairly, I tend to limit my fine dining options to whatever places are on Open Table. After discussion with my wife, we booked a 9:30 reservation at Spring. The time was approximately 8:45 p.m.

Since we live in North Center, we caught a cab around 9:05. We arrived at Spring around 9:25, and my wife went inside while I settled with the driver. Suddenly my wife reappeared. She told me that the kitchen had closed at nine and our reservation had been cancelled. The hostess had apologized (my wife said she was friendly) and said something along the lines of, "I'm not sure how your reservation went through. I tried to contact you at home."

We got back in the cab and went elsewhere. Upon returning home, we had a message from Spring on the answering machine timed 9:18 p.m.

Has anyone else had this problem with Open Table reservations before? I assume it is common for a restaurant to close the kitchen early if they have no reservations on the books after a certain time, but as long as Open Table lists availability. . .

I've had a few issues with making reservations through OpenTable, especially when making a same-day reservation. After running into some of the same problems as you did ("I don't know why the system gave you the reservation"), I've just stopped using it for same day and have reverted back to the old school system of picking up the phone and talking to someone.

I have never had a problem, but I am aware of the fact that when using OpenTable, there is still a human being that has to maintain the restaurant's reservation system and that person can make mistakes. Obviously, Spring made a big mistake by marking that time slot as available.

Being aware of the human-error factor, I always confirm my OpenTable reservations over the phone.

Best,
Michael

lesson: don't use opentable. humans err as is. no need for them to have an extra scapegoat.

and you didn't miss much. i think Spring is the worst of Shawn McClain's establishments

TonyC wrote:and you didn't miss much. i think Spring is the worst of Shawn McClain's establishments

I haven't been to Spring in a few years so I can't really comment, but are there ANY restaurants that you actually like?

good news doesn't sell newspapers.

Josephine mentioned how her Alinea experience was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. she didn't write about it

Fair enough. I like a good trashing as much as the next guy, but I also want you to have joy in your life Tony

What happened to you sounds like a frustrating experience -- perhaps a perfect storm of computer error (accepting the late reservation) and human error (not catching the mistake or calling soon enough). However, I 'd just like to note that I use opentable.com all of the time and never have encountered any problems, even when making "same day" reservations. I find opentable to be extremely convenient and user friendly, and -- while I suppose that, even in this day and age, it's not too difficult to pick up the phone -- I find that opentable really, really comes in handy.

Ron A. wrote:perhaps a perfect storm of computer error (accepting the late reservation) and human error (not catching the mistake or calling soon enough).

Bad situation, but I blame it completely on human error. Computers don't make errors, they do exactly what they are told. If it accepted a bad reservation, it's because someone told it that it was OK to take a reservation at that time. Now, the identity of that "someone" is a mystery. It could be Spring, it could be OpenTable staff, or it could be people that wrote the OpenTable software.

My money's on Spring.

I use OpenTable on occasion mainly because it's so easy to see what's open at a bunch of places at once and not get frustrated calling every place you can think of to no avail. It's one of those cool Internet how-did-we-ever-got-along-without-this things. But I think the advice with same-day reservations is well taken. Too easy for them to miss your res on a busy night.

eatchicago wrote:My money's on Spring.

That said, they did try to contact Gus at home, at least according to the hostess.

As folks have said, restaurants are not all that high tech, even if they are plugged in to OpenTable.com. I would never expect a reservation to go through on 45 minutes notice!

That said, OpenTable.com should probably adjust their system to not accept reservations within a certain window, or should require the restaurant management to set a latest-acceptable-reservation threshold. You should tell 'em so

germuska wrote:

eatchicago wrote:My money's on Spring.

That said, they did try to contact Gus at home, at least according to the hostess.

I assume that there's a little checkbox that they use to indicate which slots are open and a place to put in how many of each table they'll accept.

I'll bet dollars-to-donuts that the kitchen changed their hours for a particular night and someone forgot to un-check a checkbox.

I think the main point of this post isn't about Open Table it's about how Spring didn't handle things correctly. Someone left the message so the staff was aware there was a late table coming in. How hard would it have been for the staff to feed one more table as the kitchen was closing up? A kitchen like Spring probably still has close to a full kitchen staff cleaning up, feed the last table. Don't let anyone else in the door but feed these people. At the very least a $25 gift certificate + an offer a free drink at the bar (while the staff cleaned up) and this post probably never would of been made. I can't believe someone with three highly successful, money making restaurants, held in high regard around this city would have such poor managers working for him.

Doesn't it seem odd that Spring would close their kitchen at 9:00 p.m. Does McClain think this is ___ (fill in the blank)?"

As someone who works in a restaurant that uses Opentable, I can tell you that a reservation made through Opentable shows up immediately on the restaurant's Opentable system. It doesn't matter if you make it on the same day or not.

I guess for the sake of being fair, maybe Spring's Opentable system doesn't work that way, but....

OpenTable (the staff or software) is not at fault here. It is the sole responsibility of the restaurant staff to configure OpenTable to allow a guest to reserve a table within a specific window of time (the normal hours of operation). If the staff decides to change the closing time, they also need to adjust the original OpenTable configuration. OpenTable only does what it's 'told' to do.

geep