Just the other day, I was on the phone for most of the morning trying to get through to a restaurant on Changkat Bukit Bintang. For the first couple of hours, no one picked up the phone — then I went to the restaurant’s Facebook page and discovered that the restaurant only opens at 4pm on weekdays. And so at 4pm, I dialled the number. This time, it was engaged — for the next 30 minutes. I finally managed to make reservations at 4.37pm.

It really is peculiar that in this day and age, when one is able to do almost everything online — from booking flights and hotels or renting a car to even shopping for groceries and ordering pizza — that restaurants still take reservations almost exclusively by telephone.

Well, one company has provided a solution — eat2eat Pte Ltd, a Singaporean company that empowers restaurants and hotels to enable online bookings for table and other reservations. The company, which was established in 2000, is the most reputable and longest serving online table reservations platform in Asia-Pacific.

“It is limiting to take reservations just by phone,” says Vikram Aggarwal, CEO of eat2eat. “Simply enabling diners to access the restaurant online, a restaurateur can enhance service standards, boost revenue and productivity, plus significantly improve customer loyalty and retention. All of which impact their bottom line.”

eat2eat’s software has been tried and tested in a wide variety of environments by the region’s largest and most well known hospitality brands over the past decade. It takes full advantage of the latest cloud technology, and offers a range of solutions to the restaurateur to manage reservations — from enterprise software MaRc (Multiple Access Reservation Centre) that runs Hotel Groups like Starwood Hotels and Resorts Asia Pacific to the ability to accept reservations on an iPad or a mobile. It saves the restaurant valuable space as a computer terminal is not required.

Users are not required to visit the eat2eat.com website to make the reservation as eat2eat can be incorporated seamlessly into any establishment’s existing website with the simple addition of a short snippet of code, after which bookings are updated in real time. Additionally, the restaurant can be listed and booked through the eat2eat website, giving it added exposure to diners looking for new places to try.

Restaurants in Malaysia have yet to utilise the portal. Currently, only a handful of restaurants (mainly hotel F&B outlets) across four destinations — Kuala Lumpur, Kota Kinabalu, Kuching and Langkawi — are featured in eat2eat. Of course, users who register are able to suggest their favourite restaurants and eat2eat will then follow up to see if these establishments are keen on taking up eat2eat’s services. The dining scene in our urban centres is growing tremendously, particularly in the gourmet and lifestyle categories, that it only makes sense that it embraces this technology.

As founder and proprietor of the Michelangelo’s Group (Singapore) Michael Hadley observes, “Since we launched online reservations for our group using the eat2eat software, we have been receiving a significant proportion of reservations a month online. It has improved our productivity because we have less resource manning the phones and constantly being interrupted from their daily routines to take reservations. It has also allowed customers flexibility in reaching us for reservations, as well as enabled us to use the CRM tools embedded in the system to enhance their dining experience, all of which has impacted our bottom line.”

Apart from Malaysia and Singapore, eat2eat has been launched in Australia, Bangladesh, China, Fiji Islands, Guam, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and Vietnam.

“Although we are a Singaporean company, our focus has always been to offer regional coverage to our diners and to this end, we’ve spent the past few years signing up multiple regional deals, such as our initiative with Starwood Hotels and Resorts — www.eatdrinkandmore.com. We have been privileged to be the developers of this space in Asia Pacific, as we work with the industry to change reservation habits of a lifetime,” shares Vikram.

“Interestingly, over the past decade, it was initially restaurants who wanted to be able to offer online reservations but consumers weren’t yet accustomed to reserving tables that way but now, consumers are demanding the flexibility to book online. With the advent of smart phone technology, Apple’s iPad, mobile Internet penetration and speed and the acceptance of restaurateurs to secure their databases, using pen and paper to manage restaurants is exiting the stage left.”


This article appeared on the Live it! page, The Edge Financial Daily, November 18, 2011.