Foursquare partners with OpenTable to add reservation links
Foursquare today launched a much-needed partnership with OpenTable to add reservation links directly to restaurant venue pages on the website. The move completes the loop between finding a place to eat with foursquare Explore and making the reservation to actually eat there.
The “Make a Reservation” link appears directly below the map on venue pages, right next to the menu link and price range provided by Single Platform. More than 15,000 restaurants are already covered, with more on the way.
This change makes startup ReserveMyCity largely irrelevant, since most of their functionality is now replicated by foursquare themselves. When writing about that, I noted that OpenTable didn’t have an API, which would make a direct link from foursquare difficult. Apparently they’ve overcome that obstacle.
Now that the hard work of linking venues and OpenTable restaurants is done, it’s presumably only a matter of time before the mobile apps get similar links to the OpenTable app, making it easy to find and reserve on mobile, as well.
Even better, the links to OpenTable already appear in the foursquare API. It would be trivial for other apps built on the platform, especially those focused on food (think Lunchbox), to add the links to their apps, too.
What do you think of the change?
