Key Mobile Apps for Restaurant and Bar Goers

The Internet — and more particularly, the Internet via mobile apps — has continued to play a key role in how today’s most successful dining and drinking establishments reach new customers and stay connected with their more loyal patrons. The most important sites and apps generally serve to provide restaurant directories, ratings and reviews, and many with not just researchable content, but with instant linkage into the social media world, magnifying their impact many times over. While it would be impossible to list every restaurant-related site and app, restaurants, bars and their patrons would be well advised to take note of a few of the more well known. Here’s a brief list to get you started.

Yelp and Urbanspoon

Odds are you have Yelp®, Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor® or a similar application on your phone or tablet. Apps of this nature allow users to rate restaurants based on their experience and also leave reviews to help others decide whether it’s worth eating there or not. In addition to this, they also allow you to search for restaurants in the area, so people can find highly rated establishments in their own neighborhood.

"This illustrates that people take these ratings to heart; good (and bad) ratings can ultimately affect turnout and thus demand the attention of restaurant professionals."

This has nearly revolutionized the way people choose where to eat. While someone may have ventured to try a restaurant simply because they walked by it or a friend recommended it, now people can make a decision before even stepping out of the house, knowing exactly where the restaurant is located, what kind of food it serves, what the atmosphere is like and more.

A 2011 Berkeley study showed evidence that higher Yelp® ratings caused restaurants to fill more tables: an additional half-star (which is Yelp®’s rating system) equals a 19 percentage point increase in sell out frequency. These results are even more dramatic when there’s not a lot of information available about the restaurant. This illustrates that people take these ratings to heart; good (and bad) ratings can ultimately affect turnout and thus demand the attention of restaurant professionals.

Alfred

The Alfred application helps you find new restaurants to try, but it doesn’t do it according to a rating system. Alfred asks what your favorite restaurants are for different meals (brunch, dinner, dessert, etc.) and uses its algorithm to identify restaurants you’re likely to enjoy based on the places you listed as your favorites.

Applications like this indirectly benefit restaurants because they allow people to explore different options they may not have been aware of. In addition, Alfred provides targeted recommendations, thus increasing the likelihood users will enjoy their time at the restaurant and increasing the possibility they’ll be repeat customers.

Foursquare

Like Yelp, Foursquare has had an obvious effect on the way restaurant chains operate, at least in their marketing departments. Foursquare involves people checking in to different establishments, leaving tips for other people and searching for what’s near them, among other things. You can add friends and see where they’re checking into, which adds a major social component to the app.

In order to gain more check-ins and overall exposure, restaurants will offer deals for people checking in to their location, like a free item or a discount. While not all restaurants offer perks, a majority of chain restaurants have a presence on Foursquare; Yahoo! Finance reported that 86% of chains are on the site, according to a Restaurant Sciences study. It’s clear that as Foursquare continues to expand its offerings, restaurants will continue to participate in order to garner more attention.

OpenTable and BuzzTable

Once technology’s helped someone choose a restaurant, it can also help them secure a table. The OpenTable® app lets people make reservations at participating restaurants while on the go. This takes waiting an hour at the restaurant or even making a phone call out of the equation and makes things easier for both the customer and the restaurant.

BuzzTable, on the other hand, allows restaurants to manage wait lists and allows guests to see where they appear on the wait lists. The idea of the guest-facing part of this app is that it provides restaurant-related content to keep guests interested and more likely to wait and eat at the restaurant. Apps like this continue to change the way restaurants engage with their potential guests in order to fill more tables and increase profits.