Now, an app to book restaurant seats

Rajkumari Sharma Tankha

Have you ever found yourself in a sticky situation with unannounced guests arriving at your doorstep for dinner? Sticky, because you have not prepared extra food that will fulfill the needs of four-five people and you know that you are going to get late in office. You would like to take your guests to some good restaurant. But you neither have the contact numbers of restaurants nor the time to search the Internet and make the calls.

Don’t panic. Help is round the corner. All you have to do is pick up your smart phone (I am sure you have one) and download Clicktable Restaurant Booking, an app through which you will have access to all, well almost all, restaurants in the area near you, and through which you can book the desired number of seats. No hassle, no worry. Just a click is all you need.

Launched in 2015, Clicktable is one-of-its-kind cloud-based application that facilitates casual and fine dining restaurants to manage everything, from guestbook, reservation, wait list, events and offers to business analytics, all through a single portal.

In Delhi-NCR region, as many as 800 restaurants are on board Clicktable. The company plans to launch the service in major metros, including Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune soon.

The brainchild of Varun Gupta, an MBA from Columbia University (New York), Clicktable offers real-time solutions.  “It is an easy to operate software that facilitates a smoother dining experience,” he says.  “In the US, this service is very common. I noticed that people booked their restaurants seats only through the phones, and I was quite impressed with its usability,” he adds.

“Back in India, I missed that seamless restaurant reservation experience I got in US. While US has many such apps, in India there is none. Here, booking a restaurant seat is a tedious task. One has to keep calling multiple restaurants, particularly during the weekends. It was then that I decided to come up with Clicktable,” says Gupta.

“Both a restaurateur and a customer are aware of the glaring gaps in the restaurant service and customer communication chain. But there was no one who tried to address this issue. We aim to provide restaurateurs across the country with scalable real-time solutions to optimize their businesses,” says Gupta.

Clicktable offer seamless two-way communication and automated wait list management, and has several advantages over manual management practices, including improved customer flow, table inventory optimization, contingency management, automated queue management and better personalization. Further, a diner also has an option to avail amazing offers and deals offered by restaurants.