[Screens Around Town] OpenTable, St. Louis Cardinals, and Apple Jan 24
12 comments Latest by Manuel Martensen
OpenTable
Tony writes:
I was searching around OpenTable and stumbled across their page for prospective restaurateurs. They provide a quick summary and demo of what open table is and how it can benefit your restaurant. I thought this screen/graphic on their pricing page was a great way to communicate the value of their product without naming a price up front.
St. Louis Cardinals seating
Matt Galligan writes:
I was looking at getting my dad St. Louis Cardinal’s tickets for Christmas and happened upon their Seating Chart. It’s really cool, you pick where you are wanting to potentially sit, then click on the actual seat and it shows you a picture of what it will look like from that seat!
Apple survey
Brandon Kelly writes:
I was just at Apple’s support site, and a couple pages in I was invited to take a survey. I clicked ‘Yes’, but rather than being redirected or getting a big pop-up covering the active browser window, the type simply changed to what you see here (“The survey is available under your current browser window. Please wait until after you have completed your visit to take the survey.”). Talk about nonintrusive.
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12 comments so far
sbh 24 Jan 08
The seating charts might be standardized across all Major League Baseball sites. The same thing happens for other stadiums (such as my Houston Astros’, who are better than STL , Minute Maid Park). It is a VERY cool feature, I think.
Greg Macoy 24 Jan 08
The Apple approach here is nice. I hate it when websites pop-up a survey window when you’re trying to do something.
Don Schenck 24 Jan 08
The Hershey Theatre does the seating chart thing, too. Nice.
BTW , it’s one of the most glorious theatres ever! And having just visited the site, time to pick up my tickets to Spamalot!
Adam Sanderson 24 Jan 08
Apple’s survey may be the only time a pop under has ever been good for the user. Interesting use.
Neil 24 Jan 08
The St. Louis Cardinals seating plan rocks!
Now all they need to do is to put live-streaming cameras in the same place as the static photo for each seating position, and they could stream the game live through the visualisation!
They could sell double their seating capacity for each game, too. You’d have a ‘virtual seating buddy’ during each game, i.e. one person is in the real seat in the stadium, the other is in the virtual seat on the Web! How cool would that be? It would be like a blind date, only with something to talk about!
I’m a sad man.
Jeff 24 Jan 08
Funny, we do surveys the same way at my current gig.
Jay 24 Jan 08
OpenTable is a good service, but the comparison here seems misleading. As a supplement/replacement to the restaurant’s existing reservation practices, the 253 seats surely would not all have been empty without OpenTable. Personally I almost always prefer prices up front rather than claims like this taking their place. A price immediately tells me whether a product is at all affordable for me, and then if so I can find out more about it to determine its value to me.
Kenn Wilson 24 Jan 08
I wonder how many restaurants don’t even consider Opentable due to the lack of pricing information? I’ve found that having to request prices usually means that the product or service is extremely overpriced and they want to hide it until they can get you on the phone to hard-sell it.
John 24 Jan 08
Yes, MLB offers this feature for all the stadiums in the league. It’s been available for a few years now – very cool indeed.
Will 25 Jan 08
The small print in OpenTable is odd too. It says that most restaurants make the cost back in 4-6 months. If OpenTable provides over ten times as many tables as needed per month, why is it taking 4-6 months to make its cost back?
Darrin Demchuk 25 Jan 08
@Will
I just did a write up about this pricing page and made a point very similar to yours. While the idea behind their pricing page is a good one, the actual implentation of it is sketchy at best. Coupling incompatible claims with shady “free quote requests” is a surefire way to lose potential clients in my opinion
Manuel Martensen 25 Jan 08
Matt wrote about how OpenTable presented the information, not about if OpenTable is worth using.
Don’t mix that up.
Comments are closed