This new tool might just solve the restaurant reservation chaos

There’s a seemingly ever-expanding number of tools to find restaurants and reserve a table. It’s convenient for consumers and potentially good for restaurants, which have more ways than ever to reach customers. But behind the scenes, managing multiple reservation platforms can be a headache for restaurant staff. That’s because competing reservation platforms typically don’t interoperate. Unlike the airline and hotel industries, where competing online travel agencies connect to central systems that let them see and manage the same inventory of available tickets or bookings, each reservation provider typically maintains its own database of seatings. That means restaurant hosts need to juggle multiple apps—or even multiple devices—to look up reservations or figure out if there’s room for walk-in customers on a busy night. “If you walk into a restaurant, some of them have two or three iPads at the host stand,” says Joel Montaniel, cofounder and CEO of SevenRooms, a restaurant marketing and reservation platform that was acquired by DoorDash last year. To help make the situation more manageable, SevenRooms on June 16 launched a free tool called Channel Connect, which automatically syncs reservation data from multiple sources to a restaurant’s preferred platform. That doesn’t have to be SevenRooms, Montaniel emphasizes, and the free software is available even for restaurateurs that don’t otherwise use SevenRooms’ services. The company also emphasizes that it doesn’t store data that restaurants don’t explicitly configure to be transferred into SevenRooms systems. Though it seems inevitable that, if the software becomes successful, it will serve as an advertisement for SevenRooms’ other services, Montaniel says Channel Connect isn’t directly intended to drive new paid business. “We decided that it doesn’t matter if you use SevenRooms or not,” Montaniel says. “What matters is that restaurants should get to choose and control which places they want to meet their consumer