Are you a red wine drinker? Big spender? Or perhaps you’re a slow eater, the kind of person who sits at a restaurant table for longer than you’d like. You might not even know it – but OpenTable does.
These are just some of the notes that reservation platforms have started providing to some restaurant staff when you make a booking, all based on the orders you’ve made and the money you’ve spent at other restaurants in the past.
Cat Mentzer, the host of a Michelin-starred restaurant who posts about food online as Eating Out Austin, saw the new “AI-assisted” tag in action for the first time a few weeks ago and shared a look at the system on TikTok. Most emphasize that the customer frequently orders specific drinks, such as red wine or cocktails, but others focus on customers who spend more than average, leave reviews frequently (“Be nice to them,” jokes), or have a tendency to cancel tables at the last minute. “Mine just says ‘Juice,'” she admits. “I love to have brunch, it’s true.”
If you’re like me, this all may have come as a surprise. After all, I use OpenTable to make reservations – so how will it know what I’ve ordered?
The truth is, OpenTable – like Resy and other rivals – has always done more than just help you find a table. The platform is offered as a one-stop shop for restaurants to handle reservations, waitlists, reviews, marketing, and more, but it also offers its own table management software, along with integration into the most popular point of sale (POS) systems in the industry like Toast or EPOS. These are the equipment that run most of the day-to-day operations in a restaurant, including inventory, ordering, and payments.
This way OpenTable knows that you usually order a couple of glasses of white wine with dinner. You don’t even need to book through OpenTable – as long as you have an OpenTable account, and give the restaurant your phone number or email, your booking can be linked to your profile. OpenTable will then know when you arrived, what you ordered, how much you spent, what time you paid, and much more. Data finds a way.
Still, the company may know less about you than you think. I used its privacy rights request form to pull up a copy of all the data it had on me, and it was reassuringly mundane: some basic contact details, a list of reservations I’ve made through the platform, and some limited credit card information. A reservation from 2012 noted that I was a “first-time diner,” and that was it.
But let’s say OpenTable knows more about you than I do. What would a restaurant want from that information? It’s essentially a smaller, simpler version of the kind of research and notes that some restaurants — especially fine dining — handle anyway. Some Michelin-starred restaurants spend hours each week scouring guests’ social media profiles to gauge their preferences, and San Francisco’s Lazy Bear maintains a database of 115,000 past guests in case they ever return. The mentor told me that the Austin restaurant where she works tracks some of these details as well. There are practical notes, like which customers are always late and who have a tendency to show off, but there are also more personal touches – there’s that one guy who always brings up the first dates, so there’s a note for staff to behave as if they haven’t seen him before, or couples who are experienced and would both like to sit with their backs to a wall and have a view outside.
“We keep track of your child’s name, how many times you’ve visited with us, whether there’s a dish you really like, things like that,” the mentor says. “It’s all meant to surprise and delight every reservation.”
He’s less confident that OpenTable’s AI-assisted notes can do the same thing. “We’re taking them with a grain of salt,” she says, adding that, “many of them seem so random.” Automated notes are obviously simpler than those for restaurants, but worse, they’ll tie together an account holder’s data with everyone they’ve ever dined with. Someone might carry a “high spender” tag for handling business dinners on a company card, or a wine drinker might be marked as a cocktail lover if he or she frequently goes out with drinking friends. There is a privacy issue here, but there are also a lot of practical problems. “I counter with not trusting tags,” Mentzer says.
OpenTable wouldn’t say how long it has been collecting POS data, nor when it started sharing it with restaurants. Senior Communications Director Mary-Kate Smitherman explains The Verge AI-assisted tags are a beta feature, currently only available to restaurants on the OpenTable Pro plan. She didn’t tell me what AI model the company uses, but says it is not used to process individual guest data. Instead, the AI element is in analyzing restaurant item descriptions such as “glass of cabernet” and classifying them as “red wine,” making it possible to classify and aggregate large, messy datasets of customer orders.
“We’re taking them with a grain of salt.”
“The technology benefits the business and provides a special experience for diners,” says Smitherman, and it was introduced “following feedback and requests” from restaurants. For example, “They can help the server suggest a dish you’ll enjoy or recognize that you prefer more comfort food.” She confirms that OpenTable shares the information “on our network,” before defending her right to do so. “What we share with restaurants is guided by the choices you make in your privacy preferences,” she tells me, pointing me to the platform’s privacy policy.
The privacy policy is actually a bit opaque on this. Of course it notes that data will be shared with a restaurant when you book, but only lists the details you might expect: your name, contact details, party size and special requests, plus the vague “meal preferences” everything. There’s a note that it may also share “additional information about your dining activity at that restaurant or restaurant group in the past,” but there’s no indication that information about visits to unaffiliated restaurants will be included.
A separate section acknowledges that OpenTable collects POS data from participating restaurants (“such as items ordered, total amount billed, and time spent in the restaurant”), but only says it will be used “to provide restaurants with aggregate information about their customers.” While the policy itself defines aggregate information as “general statistics that cannot be linked to you or any other specific user,” Smitherman told me it also refers to “insights collected about individual customers” — such as the fact that, overall, I drink a lot of red wine.
As Smitherman suggests, users can opt out. You can do this by logging into your account, going to your profile, and then going to the “Preferences” page. You’ll find six options related to the privacy policy, but the most important one is the last one: “Allow OpenTable to use point of sale information.” Uncheck that, and your order history will be your own again.
For now, this appears to be unique to OpenTable. Its main competitor, Resy, collects “transaction data” and “metadata about your eating habits and experiences”, which can be shared with “restaurants and their partners”, according to its privacy policy. But Resy communications director Lauren Young told me that “point of sale data or guestbook information” is not shared with “unaffiliated restaurants.” Restaurants with the same owners may be able to share information between them, but unlike OpenTable, details derived from your dining history with them will not be handed over to other restaurants with different ownership.
Take this as a good reminder that OpenTable was never just about reservations, and you were always part of the product, whether you knew it or not.
But you probably don’t have to worry that a restaurant will treat you very differently because it knows what wine you like or how long you tend to eat. At least not yet, when these tools are so rudimentary that employees may as well ignore them as they notice them.
“These tags are like the anonymous tips of an unreliable narrator,” says Mentzer. “You were probably going to get good (or bad) service anyway.”