Restaurant reservation startup Eat announces the launch of two independent partnerships with TripAdvisor and Time Out Dubai that make it easier for diners to make online reservations and restaurants to grow their revenue.
Visitors to either the TripAdvisor or Time Out Dubai websites are now able to make instantly confirmed bookings at hundreds of partner restaurants through the integration of Eat’s real-time table booking technology.
Founded by Nezar Kadhem, and based in Dubai, Eat is on a mission to help restaurants increase their revenue by providing table and reservation management systems that drive incremental bookings.
The partnerships allow restaurants to turn the huge web traffic of both TripAdvisor and Time Out Dubai into confirmed reservations. TripAdvisor attracts 415 million monthly visitors.
With these partnerships, residents and tourists, seeking out restaurants on TripAdvisor and Time Out Dubai will now:
1. See ‘Book a table’ buttons on the profiles of the restaurants
2. When they click, a booking widget is loaded that returns real time table availability
3. The diner can then place a reservation through Eat’s real-time booking system
4. The reservation is confirmed by SMS and Email
At this point, the partnerships are live with almost 1000 restaurants in Bahrain, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
When asked about what this means for Eat,Nezar, the founder, had this to say, “We now represent travelers with TripAdvisor, expats with our Time Out Dubai partnership, and the Middle East’s foodies and passionate fine dining users with eatapp.co. Once restaurants plug into our network, they gain rich access to the largest pool of diners in the Middle East. We are honored by the trust of these partners and hope to continue growing together.”
The partnership is evidence that a small, regional startup can partner with some of the world’s largest technology platforms by understanding, and building technology, that meets the needs of the market.
By building a booking system that hugely improved the user experience of online reservations, Eat was able to approach potential partners with a product that was more compelling, scalable and easier to implement.
In 2017 Dubai is expected to receive 9.2million tourists with the UAE F&B market as a whole generating $12.5billion.