SevenRooms launches a reservations aggregator for restaurants
Channel Connect will allow restaurants to manage bookings from different platforms all in one place, even if they don’t use SevenRooms.
“Channel Connect was built so that no single platform has to be the gatekeeper to your operations.”
Reservations system SevenRooms wants to make it possible for restaurants to manage all of their bookings in one place.
The company on Tuesday unveiled Channel Connect by SevenRooms, a desktop app that aggregates reservations from various booking channels into a single system, while also automatically updating a restaurants’ inventory across those channels.
SevenRooms, which is owned by DoorDash, said Channel Connect will free operators from having to use multiple tablets to manually reconcile double bookings. And for customers, it will mean more access to tables, because restaurants won’t have to limit their inventory to certain sites.
“More tables for diners, one book for restaurants,” SevenRooms co-founder and CEO Joel Montaniel said in a video announcing the news.
Montaniel said the program will bring restaurants up to speed with hotels and airlines, which have been handling bookings this way for years.
Notably, the company is offering Channel Connect for free under an open license, meaning it will be available to any restaurant, even those that don’t use SevenRooms. The company said it is designed to fill an industry need, not grow SevenRooms’ business.
The program will pull in bookings from reservation apps, search engines, social media, review sites, the restaurant’s website, AI agents, and hotel concierges, and inject them all into the restaurant’s preferred system of record, where they can be managed in one dashboard.
This includes reservations from “major booking platforms,” which presumably means SevenRooms’ chief rivals, OpenTable and Resy. Channel Connect is able to access that data “through mechanisms those platforms already provide, using credentials and the data the restaurant controls,” a SevenRooms spokesperson said.
Restaurants will own the customer data within Channel Connect and will have control over who else can access it.
The move comes amid fierce competition in the reservations market between SevenRooms, OpenTable, and Resy.
In April, OpenTable began requiring restaurant clients to make it their system of record and make all of their inventory available on OpenTable. The company said it was an effort to protect restaurant and customer data from “bad actors” who were trying to gain access to it without permission.
Channel Connect seems to be at least partially a response to that strict policy. In a blog post by SevenRooms intended to refute negative “claims” about its new system, the company references OpenTable’s new terms and says “Channel Connect was built so that no single platform has to be the gatekeeper to your operations.”
