There’s a lot of money to be made in the online restaurant reservation business and leading the pack is opentable.com. The company which started all the way back in 1998 (ages in tech terms) has quietly maintained its place and developed a reach that now includes a roster of over 16,000 restaurants. That huge cadre of restaurants has helped it to a whopping $34.4 million in Q3 revenues for fiscal year 2011. Extrapolated that’s a whopping $137.6 million a year.
OpenTable measures its success with making reservations through what it calls ‘seated diners’, and according to reports, the number of seated diners have jumped 48% to 23.6 million globally. OpenTable’s US operations continue to show good performance but it’s the revenues from its international operations that are most impressive. In the last 12 months revenues for international operation has grown by 254%, with seated diners also performing exceptionally well with a 233% increase.OpenTable has also been busy acquiring like-business and only October last year (2010), acquired a rival website called Toptable.com. According to a OpenTable spokesperson, the strong numbers recorded for the last 9 months reflect some of the business procured through Toptable.com.
As people migrate more and more onto iPads and smartphones, sites like OpenTable will become the rule, not the exception.
Would you use a service like OpenTable to book a restaurant? Let us know in the comments below.
source: http://www.sitetrail.com/2011/11/06/opentable-makes-137.6-million-in-yearly-revenue/