Tablefinder, one of the six winners at the recent London SeedCamp,
has come good with its intention to partner with one of the two main global restaurant booking systems, Livebookings Network. The startup remains in an invitation-only beta, however.
Founded in 2006 in Gothenburg, Sweden, Tablefinder is a live search and reservation engine for restaurant tables which aggregates booking services in order to offer a platform that – eventually – reaches 100% of the online bookable restaurants.
All Tablefinder – whose mission is to become the world’s largest search and booking engine for restaurant tables – needs to do next is sign a deal with OpenTable, Livebookings effective competitor. We’ll see.
Livebookings recently announced a partnership with Bookatable.de, bringing it to 10,000 restaurants bookable online. The network is based in London and has five other offices across Europe which cover the UK, Scandinavia, France,
Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerlan. It also includes more than 500 booking partners such as Time Out, Lastminute, Sugarvine, Telegraph.co.uk, Laterooms.com, VisitBritain, Ticketmaster and American Express.
But Tablefinder is not just an aggregator of booking systems. It has a social networking element too which provides guests with suggestions about where to dine, and lets them keep track of where their friends are eating and where they have been. Yes, creepy, but useful.
Tablefinder intends to offer a widget feature enabling sites to monetize visitors to its partner restaurants.
Are they competing for the same market space as toptable.co.uk? Do toptable use an integrated booking system or are most of their deals with restaurants on a telephone/ad hoc basis I wonder?
toptable has a direct relationships with many thousands of restaurants accross the globe although we mainly focus on Europe at the moment. Our model has been to build a passionate audience of foodies to whom our restaurants clients can market using special offers and other activity. We are a competitor to Opentable and Livebookings. We always welcome new players to the market – in fact we provide booking to over 200 other restaurant related sites such as The Guardian, British Airways, Square Meal, ViaMichelin, The AA etc.