A familiar experience: You try make a restaurant reservation on a Saturday, but the only slots left are for 5:30 or 10 p.m. You’re a risk taker, so you take a chance on grabbing a walk-in spot at the eatery down the street. After a 45-minute wait, you’re jammed into a child-sized table right next to the bus station. What’s worse, it takes another 20 minutes before your adult beverages get into your hands and let’s not even talk about your food.
Rezzit21, a startup with a soon-to-launch platform for restaurants and restaurant-goers alike, hopes to make all of the aforementioned issues disappear. In addition to letting customers have control over their dining experiences, the venture is giving restaurants a comprehensive solution to overhaul their operations and put money back into their pockets.
So what makes Rezzit21, which will launch mid-May, so different from other restaurant-related solutions, like OpenTable and Reserve? According to the venture’s co-founders - Dan Roland, Bill Roland and Cole Dillon - a lot.
Let’s start with the restaurant-goer side. You can make reservations through Rezzit21. Nothing special, right? Wrong. This site is like OpenTable on crack.
When you select the place and time you want to make a reservation for, you’re then prompted to select the exact table in a restaurant where you’d like to sit. If it’s not available for the time you want, the site tells you when that table will turn, so you can adjust your reservation if you feel so inclined. Rezzit21 also presents you with a list of menu options that you can pre-order. So if you want a round of Manhattans and appetizers waiting on your table when you arrive, it’s done.
“It’s for people who think, ‘I don’t want to wait for my wine. I want the bottle open, breathing and sitting at the table I selected when I get there,’” Bill explained.
Or, if you’re celebrating a special occasion, the site will let restaurants offer items from external vendors that you can have purchased and delivered to your seat beforehand. Just think: You’ll look like a hero having her favorite flowers and a bottle of champagne already sitting there when you walk in for your anniversary dinner - when all you did was click your mouse a couple of times.
Unlike other reservation tools, Rezzit21 asks users to create a highly personalized profile that allows restaurants give you the very best dining experience possible. For example, you can enter any dietary restrictions or allergies. All of this information is saved and sent to restaurants each time you make a reservation, so you don’t have to have that awkward conversation with the waitstaff whenever you go out to eat. It also lets you enter your culinary preferences and favorite restaurants, prompting the site to make personalized suggestions for places you should check out next.
Now, let’s focus on what’s in it for restaurants. Right off the bat, the Rezzit21 team said the price of their platform will be more cost-effective for restaurants. For example, OpenTable is expensive and cuts into restaurant’s profits by charging a per-head fee.
Instead, Rezzit21 wants to empower restaurants, and they plan to charge a monthly subscription fee that they’re firming up but know will be less expensive than its competitors. As a result, they think eateries will actually be encouraged to put up more tables for reservations on their site, promising a financial return - not loss. Not to mention, accepting pre-orders through Rezzit21 will give restaurants money upfront, as well as a better idea of what they’ll be making and what they need for inventory on any given night. Essentially, it will take much of the guesswork out of running a restaurant.
Rezzit21 will provide an all-inclusive dashboard for restaurants. There, the GM and staff can see reports, analytics and alerts, including those about how many reservations they have coming their way. They can also drill down on individual reservations to access more detailed information about them and receive reminders to ensure they have any pre-ordered accommodations taken care of.
“We spent most of the year in a restaurant designing it. We were literally working at the bar," Dan laughed. “We wanted it to be a product that both sides could use… It made it easy to design when I could look over my should to the GM and ask, ‘Would you rather have it look like this or like that?’”
Additionally, they can manage components of their operations like their social media accounts, external vendor orders and table layouts. They’ll also have the chance to review diners and go over reviews they have received, which are restricted only to people who have made a reservation and actually showed up to it.
If you can believe it, all of these features are just a part of Rezzit21’s first phase. Because they’re building an entire platform, there’s more to come (the startup has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding, according to the founders). As the company adds more functions, the hope is to create different-tiered user accounts for further revenue, while still maintaining a freemium option for certain features. The more the startup expands its product, though, the more they know there will have to be an onboarding process for restaurants. But they think it's worth it.
“No one else is building a full, comprehensive platform,” Cole explained. “Restaurants use ŕ la carte solutions from different companies. As a GM, you’ll use 4 or 5 standalone products… We’re trying to break down that disconnect and eliminate the need for different logins.”
Image via Rezzit21.
