ChatGPT seated 190,000 OpenTable diners in September

Some of those tables are in hotel restaurants, and OpenTable's plans page doesn't say whether a ChatGPT diner counts as a free direct booking or a $1 to $1.50 network cover

by Markus Busch

Driving the news. On Booking Holdings' third-quarter call on November 3, finance chief Ewout Steenbergen said OpenTable's integration with OpenAI seated 190,000 diners in September. Chief executive Glenn Fogel called it one of OpenTable's fastest-growing channels, "from a small base." Booking Holdings owns OpenTable, as it owns Booking.com.

Restaurant booking went live in ChatGPT on August 10, on every plan, according to OpenAI's release notes. OpenTable is the only one of the three partners that works worldwide. Resy covers the US, Yelp the US and Canada. So September was the first full month, and OpenTable got most of the map to itself. It is also the first dining partner on Muse, Meta's personal agent.

Booked inside the answer. The diner tells ChatGPT where and when they want to eat, how many are coming and what they like. Open times show up in the reply. The diner picks one and books it. Nobody opens the restaurant's website, and nobody picks up the phone.

Thousands of hotel restaurants. OpenTable sells its reservation system to hotels, and calls itself a partner for "thousands of hotel restaurants." Marriott made it a preferred restaurant technology provider in 2022. In July, OpenTable said dining by travelers at hotel restaurants was up 13% on a year earlier, and in its own survey 92% of respondents said they had eaten at a hotel restaurant without staying there.

Those are the covers a hotel restaurant fills without selling a room. The couple from across town on a Friday. The regular who calls the maître d' by name.

$1 to $1.50 a diner, or nothing. OpenTable bills by the seated diner. Its plans page is plain about the free end: "If a diner books directly through your website or by calling the restaurant, we don't take a cent." That holds on the Core and Pro plans. On Basic, website bookings cost $0.25 a diner or $49 a month.

A diner who finds you "on OpenTable's website, app or through our affiliate network" is a network cover. That costs $1 on Core and Pro, and $1.50 on Basic.

ChatGPT isn't on the page. OpenTable's pitch to restaurants about ChatGPT says it will answer by "recommending your restaurant and others on our network." Neither page says which column a ChatGPT diner falls into.

If it's the network column, the regular who used to phone now costs a dollar or more each time she asks ChatGPT instead.

The catch. Every figure here is Booking Holdings' or OpenTable's own. OpenTable says it seats 1.9 billion diners a year, about 158 million a month, so September's 190,000 is roughly 0.1% of the total. These are seated diners, not reservations: a table for four counts four times. Booking Holdings gave no split by country or by type of restaurant, so nobody outside OpenTable knows how many sat in a hotel dining room. And OpenTable hasn't said publicly how a ChatGPT booking is billed.

What it means for hotels. If your restaurant runs on OpenTable, open the monthly cover report for September and October. Look at how covers split by source, and whether ChatGPT bookings show up under their own name or inside the network total. Then ask your OpenTable account manager in writing: is a diner booked through ChatGPT billed as a network cover, and at what rate on your plan?

Then do what a local would. Ask ChatGPT for dinner near your hotel on a Friday, for two, at eight. See whether your restaurant comes up, with which times, and who takes the booking. If your tables sit in a system ChatGPT doesn't book, you won't get that diner from the chat at all. The answer will offer her another table.

Read also: In China, the AI agent can already sell Marriott's afternoon tea · The AI guest is still rare. Half the people who try it keep using it.

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