DoorDash reservations are here!
The company’s sharing *a lot* of announcements today, but this is the one I care about most. Reservations debut soon in Miami and New York, with more cities coming later this year.
It’s a big day! Reservations on DoorDash have arrived. The delivery giant officially wants its customers to get off the couch and go outside — while still using its app, of course.
In-app reservations are part of a larger feature, a revamped “going out” tab that launches today. They’re powered by SevenRooms, the restaurant tech platform DoorDash acquired last spring for $1.2 billion; restaurants must be SevenRooms customers to offer bookings DoorDash.
The company has been testing a version of Going Out for over a year, tempting DoorDash users in some cities with deals and specials when they visit in-store. Today’s launch is a realization of a true industry dream, tying digital delivery orders to in-store behavior in a way that restaurants should find valuable — and competing reservations companies will likely find harrowing.
“DoorDash is really about building lasting relationships with restaurant partners, and we want to enable them to build even more lasting relationships with their diners,” Parisa Sadrzadeh, DoorDash VP of strategy and ops, told me in an interview late last week. “Getting into the reservation space allows us to offer a new capability to the many, many restaurants on the platform today who offer reservations, and could use another demand channel to do so.”
DoorDash, clearly, did not come to play, even though it already knows the game. Some top restaurants agree, including The Corner Store, a true NYC hotspot that was introduced on Eater New York last October with the headline, “Taylor Swift has already been twice.” It’ll use DoorDash for reservations when they launch in the city, which feels like a real get for a brand once exclusively focused on food delivery.
Also, in a slightly coded nod to anyone who’s paid as much attention to reservations as I have over the last decade-plus (there are at least 20 of us, I’m sure), legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer is onboard, too. Meyer, once an OpenTable board member and later an early Resy partner, has already moved reservations at Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants including Union Square Cafe and Manhatta to SevenRooms. (Meyer’s investment firm, Enlightened Hospitality Investments, invested in SevenRooms a few years ago.)
“The platform gives us actionable insights that enable us to deliver personalized, memorable hospitality at every interaction,” Meyer said as part of a larger statement. “Partnering with DoorDash allows us to pair this gold standard in guest relationship management with unparalleled reach.”
Going Out is more than reservations
The company says the new tab on the increasingly crowded DoorDash app encourages its users to explore local restaurants.
Since February, 80 percent of customers who have tried Going Out in testing have visited a restaurant they’ve not ordered from. (When I told Sadrzadeh I found this stat particularly impressive and a little surprising, she agreed.)
Inside the experience, diners can access in-store offers and rewards. Rewards for in-store visits, for the most part, will be credits back to use for delivery, encouraging diners to stay inside the DoorDash ecosystem no matter how they experience restaurants. On average, diners using in-app rewards earn an average of $9 per order — also an impressive stat.
“It’s a pretty rich offer,” Sadrzadeh admitted. After an introductory phase, these offers will be available exclusively to DoorDash’s DashPass subscribers.
“It’s such a compelling way to earn credits,” she added. “It makes DashPass even more rewarding for members.”
DashPass is a boon for DoorDash. In its most recent earnings call, chief financial officer Ravi Inukonda praised “a very solid quarter,” for DashPass. The product is improving, more customers are joining, and DashPass members keep ordering frequently from more product verticals, he said.
The upgraded DoorDash pitch to restaurants
In its release, DoorDash has a name for its reservations hub: the DoorDash Reservations Marketplace. Diners will be able to browse for bookings near them or navigate to a bookings page through an individual restaurant listing.
Via SevenRooms, DoorDash is also offering restaurants voice AI that can take reservations over the phone and event management capabilities including group bookings and private dining. Notably, some restaurants that use SevenRooms for reservations and customer relationship management also use OpenTable or Resy for bookings, table management, and demand generation.
“That omnichannel spirit is not going to go away,” Sadrzadeh said, in what I feel is a very consequential statement. Hey OpenTable and Resy restaurants, DoorDash is whispering, you can use us, too.
The deal gets sweeter. DoorDash is also promising its reservations customers more data on their diners. It says it’ll offer that elusive “comprehensive view” of a guest, tying first-party ordering data to in-store behavior.
But that’s not necessarily a true comprehensive view from DoorDash, I countered during my recent interview, if that data excludes third-party marketplace orders.
Sadrzadeh said it doesn’t totally exclude that data.
“Once [the new integration] launches, restaurants will be able to know information like, This person has ordered delivery from you before. This person is a local versus a tourist. This person typically likes to order these kinds of things,” Sadrzadeh said. “So we are expanding into new types of data sharing between the marketplace and the restaurant.”
That’s the plan. The practice is still TBD.
DoorDash’s move into reservations happened faster than I expected.
When it acquired SevenRooms earlier this year, Sadrzadeh told me, “Over time I would anticipate that we’d be able to build a way for our 42 million active users to be able to book reservations through the DoorDash app.” Less than five months later, here we are.
Anecdotally, people who work in the reservations business have told me they’re watching DoorDash closely. The company’s deep connections with restaurants (and, frankly, deep pockets) position it as a real agitator in reservations status quo.
Other large deals — like the OpenTable-Uber partnership recently characterized to me by OpenTable CEO Debby Soo as “very, very deep” — will become much more important in this brave new reservations climate. Resy’s upped its game, too, partnering with Toast and promising data-sharing that should empower restaurants to act on guest data in real time.
But DoorDash is ready to compete.
“DoorDash is becoming the all-access pass for your city,” Sadrzadeh said. “I’m excited about being able to offer both new ways for customers to use DoorDash to fill the moments in their life, and new ways for partners to grow across the channels they want to grow.”
