TripAdvisor’s been busy the past week. The travel and hotel bookings company scooped up three companies – one from London, one from the Boston area and one from Paris – and announced its impressive Q1 earnings. On Tuesday, the Newton-based firm made a move that will be keeping its team even busier in the coming months: an expansion into the restaurant reservation market.
TripAdvisor acquired the aforementioned Parisian startup for just this purpose. The company, lafourchette, the leading online and mobile reservation platform for restaurants in France, Spain and Switzerland, with a network of more than 12,000 restaurant partners.
TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer spoke to the company’s interest in swooping into the relatively open field of online restaurant reservations in an earnings call on Tuesday. Stated Kaufer:
Unlike the U.S., where approximately 20 percent of existing restaurant reservations are made online, this percentage is in the single digits, in some cases low-single digits, in nearly every international market … We see a clear opportunity to match our demand with more restaurant supply in more cities, in more countries, with a focus on international markets.
In the U.S., San Francisco’s OpenTable, launched in 1999, largely rules the market. The company offers a restaurant management system that allows restaurateurs to manage their bookings online. OpenTable has garnered a customer base of over 30,000 restaurants in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Japan, Mexico and the UK.
TripAdvisor’s bid for a piece of the restaurant reservations market is an interesting one. The company dominates bookings in hotel and flights, so completing the last part of the travel resource puzzle – restaurants – appears to be a natural next step.
