Your online reservations tell restaurants all about you

Are you a red wine drinker? High spender? Or maybe you’re a slow eater, the kind who occupies a restaurant table longer than he wants. You may not know it, but OpenTable does.

These are just a few of the observations that the reservation platform has started offering the service to some restaurant employees when you make a reservation, all based on the orders you have placed and the money you have spent at other restaurants in the past.

Kat Minter, a hostess at a Michelin-starred restaurant who blogs about food online as Eating Out Austin, first spotted the new “AI-assisted” tags in action a few weeks ago, Share a look at the system on TikTok. Most point out that a customer often orders certain drinks, such as red wine or cocktails, but others notice customers who spend more than average, frequently leave reviews (“Be nice to them,” Minter jokes), or tend to cancel tables at the last minute. “You just call me ‘juice,’” she admits. “I like eating lunch, it’s true.”

If you’re like me, all of this may come as a surprise. I only use OpenTable to make reservations, so how does it know what I ordered?

The truth is that OpenTable — like Resy and other competitors — has always done more than just help you find a table. The platform bills restaurants as a one-stop shop for handling reservations, waitlists, reviews, marketing and more, but it also offers its own services. Table management softwarealong with integration In the most popular point of sale (POS) systems in the industry, such as Toast or Epos. These are the tools that manage most of the day-to-day activities in the restaurants themselves, including inventory, orders, and payments.

This is how OpenTable knows that you usually order two glasses of white wine with dinner. You don’t even have to make a reservation through OpenTable — as long as you have an OpenTable account, and give the restaurant your phone number or email, your reservation may be associated with your profile regardless. OpenTable will then know what time you arrived, what you ordered, how much you spent, what time you paid, and more. Data finds a way.

However, the company may know less about you than you think. I used it Privacy rights request form To pull up a copy of all the data on me, which was reassuringly tedious: some basic contact details, a list of bookings I’d made through the platform, and some limited credit card information. One reservation, from 2012, had a note saying I was “dining for the first time,” and that was that.

But let’s assume that OpenTable knows more about you than it does about me. What does the restaurant want with this information? It’s basically a shorter, simpler version of the kind of research and feedback that some restaurants — especially fine dining restaurants — deal with anyway. Some Michelin-starred restaurants spend hours each week combing through guests’ social media profiles to predict their preferences, and San Francisco’s Lazy Bear keeps… Database of 115,000 previous guests If they return. Minter told me that the Austin restaurant she works at tracks some of these details, too. There are practical notes, like the clients who always arrive late and tend to not show up, but there are also more personal touches – there’s the guy who always shows up for first appointments, so there’s the note for the staff to act like they’ve never seen him before, or the veteran couple who prefers to sit with their back to the wall and a view of the exit.

“We record your child’s name, how many visits you’ve had with us, if there are any dishes they absolutely love, things like that,” Minter says. “All of this aims to surprise and delight every booking.”

She’s less confident that OpenTable’s AI-powered notes can do the same job. “We’ve been taking it with a grain of salt,” she says, adding that “a lot of it seems random.” Automated notes are obviously simpler than restaurant notes, but worse still, they will combine the account holder’s data with everyone else they have ever dined with. Someone might pick up the “high spender” tag for handling a business dinner on a company card, or a teetotaler might be flagged as a cocktail lover if he or she often goes out with friends who drink. There is a privacy issue here, but there are a lot of practical issues as well. “I go back to not trusting labels,” Minter says.

OpenTable did not say how long it had been collecting point-of-sale data, nor when it began sharing it with restaurants. says Mary Kate Smitherman, Senior Director of Communications Edge AI-powered tagging is a beta feature, and is currently only available to restaurants on their OpenTable Pro plan. She doesn’t tell me what AI model the company uses, but says it’s not used to process individual guest data. Instead, the AI ​​component analyzes descriptions of restaurant items such as “glass of cabernet” to classify them as “red wine,” making it possible to classify and aggregate large, messy data sets of customer orders.

Smitherman says the technology “benefits the company and provides a special dining experience,” and was introduced “following feedback and requests” from restaurants. “They may help the server suggest a dish you’ll like or recognize that you prefer more relaxed dining,” for example. It asserts that OpenTable shares information “across our network,” before defending its right to do so. “What we share with restaurants is guided by the choices you’ve made in your privacy preferences,” she says, directing me toward the platform’s privacy policy.

the privacy policy It’s actually a bit vague on this. Of course, the app indicates that data will be shared with the restaurant when you book, but it only lists the details you might expect: your name, contact details, party size, special requests, along with vague “dining preferences.” There’s a note that it may also share “additional information about your dining activity at this restaurant or group of restaurants in the past,” but there’s no indication that information from visits to unrelated restaurants will be included.

A separate section acknowledges that OpenTable collects point-of-sale data from participating restaurants (“such as items ordered, bill total, and time spent in the restaurant”), but states only that this will be used “to provide the restaurant with aggregate information about its customers.” While the policy itself defines aggregated information as “general statistics that cannot be linked to you or any other specific user,” Smitherman told me it also refers to “aggregated insights about individual customers” — like the fact that, in general, 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 this, and your order history will be yours again.

At the moment, this appears to be unique to OpenTable. Its main competitor, Resy, collects “transactional data” and “metadata about your dining habits and experiences,” according to Its privacy policyWhich can be shared with “restaurants and their affiliates.” But Resy’s 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 themselves, but unlike OpenTable, details derived from your dining history with them will not be handed over to other restaurants under different ownership.

Consider this a good reminder that OpenTable was never just about reservations, and that 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 type of wine you like or how long you’ve been dining. At least for now, even though these tools are so rudimentary, employees are likely to ignore them and take them to heart.

“These signs are like anonymous advice, from an unreliable narrator,” Minter says. “You’ll probably get good (or bad) service anyway.”