Remember when OpenTable caused a bunch of drama when it updated its terms of service earlier this year? Allison Page, co-founder and chief product officer at rival SevenRooms publicly decried the changes; OpenTable defended them. A Seattle business leader even asked the Washington state Attorney General to review the terms to determine if they might unfairly restrict competition. (Despite the call to action, there’s no indication this ever happened.)
Their beef (mostly) stemmed from a single phrase in the notification: system of record. In March, the 28-year-old reservations platform emailed its restaurant customers to flag new language in the TOS requiring them to use OpenTable as the restaurant’s system of record — its primary source for reservations, table and guest management.
The clarification came amid increasing stakes in the bookings business. Page, who, to be clear, leads a direct OpenTable competitor, said the only way for restaurants to comply is to “make OpenTable the center of gravity and manually reconcile everything else into it.” That’s obviously not in her company’s best interest — and Page also argued that it’s not in a restaurant’s best interest, either.
SevenRooms has always marketed itself as a way for restaurants to get closer to their booking data, no matter where any given reservation originated. In June, SevenRooms released a product called Channel Connect, designed to pull reservations and guest info from multiple channels. “Guest data is centralized into a single system of record, with secure, permissioned access across connected platforms,” it promises.
This came months after original TOS kerfuffle, including the system of record language, got enough attention that OpenTable had to clarify its position.
“OpenTable’s client agreement citing usage of OpenTable as System of Record isn’t a new term or a new way of working with many of our partners,” a company rep later said in statement emailed to numerous outlets. “By extending our System of Record standard to all partners, we are ensuring a single source of truth that protects guest and restaurant data, maintains real-time availability, and guarantees that when a guest books a table, it actually exists.”
Ah, yes, welcome to the chat, single source of truth, a close cousin of system of record and a phrase that’s equally as technical. The so-called reservations wars have a new front: the underlying technical architecture that powers them.
Before they showed up in restaurant tech discourse, the terms ‘system of record’ and ‘single source of truth’ were more technical terms.
I asked my favorite technical source, my husband who’s a career software engineer, to help. He explained the terms in context I understand:
Imagine a shared Google Doc that a few people work from, he said. That doc, which tracks changes and allows multiple inputs from varying sources, is a system of record. The same doc, holding many pieces of info, might be the single source of truth, or it could be compiled with information from multiple sources of truth. Regardless, a single source of truth exists when we (collective we!) decide that there is one, true, absolute version of a piece of information, no matter how many copies (like, say, an old Word doc circulating via email) exist.
I love an authoritative source.
My frenemies Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and their large language model peers, do too. When I — or the AI — produce(s) a piece of written work, an answer to a question, or just an appropriate response, we seek authority. My strength is human judgement and decades of experience… and while the bots care less about these attributes (rude) they still seek authority. A useful, non-hallucinating AI system needs access to one authoritative truth; otherwise the tool pulls from anything it can reach, with no way of knowing which version of a “fact” is correct.
When information on the internet doesn’t match information in real life — for example, the closed restaurant whose AI-powered phone operator insisted was open, the dinner restaurant that AI insisted was open for brunch — customers are underserved. Tech-savvy diners might know to blame the bots; others just blame the restaurant. At the same time, big tech companies say they want to be true partners, maybe even advocates, for their restaurant clients. Becoming their verifiable system of record and source of truth — by technical standards and also practical ones — carries serious weight.
And in a tech era defined by rapidly evolving AI and a growing list of integrations that determine the way a restaurant’s information shows up inside search engines and search agents and chatbots and social media listings and online map pins… it’s good to be the authority.
We all — me, a journalist, Claude, a chatbot, et al. — need access to good data to produce good work. Unfortunately, as we’ve learned, garbage in equals garbage out. A good result is only as good as its source of truth, served by its system of record.
Earning that status is the closest the major players in a fragmented industry can get to winner-take-all. And behind this battle in the reservation wars is a much simpler squabble: the fight over who gets to be right.
