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Restaurant reservations app Tok is looking to take restaurant online booking to a new level.
In a Medium post, Nik Kokonas, the restaurateur behind Alinea, Next and The Avery and owner of the Tok platform outlined what they’ve been working on making Tok the Netflix of booking tech.
According to Kokonas, trying to get a table at the restaurant you want is outdated and broken. There are some reservation software solutions out there but they’re not fit for purpose.
So they’ve put their heads together and created Tok Time, a service that includes intelligent features such The Wishlist™, InstantBook™, and a new Diner Profile with Dining History, Maps, and Personalised Recommendations.
“Booking a reservation to a restaurant remains primitive,” writes Kokonas. “OpenTable took the physical reservation folio used by hosts for a hundred years and listed the names digitally… but little else. Google assistant is now doing robocalls with an AI to restaurants with no awareness of how busy they are, what type of food they serve, or what you even like. Craziness. Why limit the host stand to a landline when we all have computers in our pockets? Very little has changed in the last 30 years, and in some ways, it’s gotten worse.”
Restaurant reservation system Tok Time works off a Diner Profile page, which will learn about your interests, your dining history, what you like and don’t like as well as allergy and dietary restrictions. With a gamified preference feature you can define your preference and where you eat will be mapped making it easy to rebook and to build a history of what works for you.
Importantly, Kokonas points out, your reviews will never be visible to anyone else, they exist only to let Tok Time understand your preferences, avoiding the “conflicts of interest inherent in Yelp, OpenTable, and other sites that both publish reviews and sell bookings”.
Also in the pipeline for later this year is Tock Time’s Wishlist, which will allow you to put your name down for those hard to get a reservation well in advance. As soon as a reservation for your party size becomes available, you’ll get a notification and your table will be held for 24 hours to give you time to book.
It’s a smart way to open up exclusive restaurants around the world and dining experiences to those who don’t have time to wait months for an online reservation to open and depend on luck as to whether you can book a table.
Another feature will be Tock Time’s InstantBook™ which will list restaurants with available tables in the next week fitting with your party size. It functions like Tinder so you just swipe left or right until you see something you like.
With plenty more features in the pipeline, it is a busy time for Tok. 2020 could be the year that restaurant reservations finally caught up with the rest of the digital world.
