Eat, a restaurant reservation startup based in Dubai has just announced its independent partnerships with TripAdvisor and Time Out Dubai. This partnership is going to make it a whole lot easier for diners to make online reservations, and at the same time, it will help restaurants grow their revenue.
Online users of TripAdvisor or Time Out Dubai can now make instant confirmed bookings in hundreds of partner restaurants, all thanks to Eat’s real-time table booking technology. With these partnerships, Eat allows restaurants to turn the huge web traffic of both TripAdvisor and Time Out Dubai into confirmed reservations.
Furthermore, this allows residents and tourists who’re searching for restaurants on both platforms to see “Book a table” buttons on the profiles of the restaurants, and when they click, a booking widget is loaded that returns real timetable availability. The diner can then place a reservation through Eat’s real-time booking system, and finally, the reservation is confirmed by SMS and Email.
Eat, a 500 Startups Company, is founded by Bahraini entrepreneur Nezar Kadhem, with the mission to help restaurants increase their revenue by providing table and reservation management systems that drive incremental bookings.
When asked about the partnership means for Eat, Nizar said: “We now represent travelers with TripAdvisor, expats with our Time Out Dubai partnership, and the Middle East’s foodies and passionate fine dining users with eatapp.co. Once restaurants are plugged into our network, they gain rich access to the largest pool of diners in the Middle East. We are very honored by the trust of these partners and hope to continue growing together.”
The partnership is evidence that a small, regional startup can partner with some of the world’s largest technology platforms by understanding, and building technology, that meets the needs of the market.
“When we looked at the data about how restaurants generate business, it quickly became clear the landscape was becoming increasingly fragmented.” Says Nezar. “The reality is that a restaurant’s own website is becoming increasingly less important as more and more people are discovering restaurants across food apps, aggregators, blogs and other media. We saw a big opportunity that others weren’t taking.”
By building a booking system that hugely improved the user experience of online reservations, Eat was able to approach potential partners with a product that was more compelling, scalable and easier to implement.
In terms of how the partnerships happened Nezar said, “Firstly, we built a product that truly met the needs of our audience and then cold-called and emailed until we got a breakthrough meeting. Even the biggest tech companies are open to working with startups if it means they can add more value.”
The partnerships is currently live with almost 1000 restaurants in Bahrain, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. In 2017 Dubai is expected to receive 9.2 million tourists with the UAE F&B market as a whole generating $12.5 billion.