Your Online Reservations Are Telling Restaurants All About You

Why It Matters

The feature gives restaurants granular, real‑time guest profiles that could shape service and upselling, but it also amplifies privacy risks and may affect diner trust as personal dining habits become widely shared across the industry.

Summary

OpenTable is rolling out an AI‑assisted tagging feature that surfaces diners’ habits—such as preferred drinks, spending level, review activity, and likelihood of cancellations—to restaurant staff via its reservation and table‑management platform. The tags are generated from POS data collected across participating restaurants and are currently available only to OpenTable Pro customers in a beta rollout. While the company says the AI merely categorizes order items to create aggregated insights, critics note the tags can conflate data from group bookings and raise privacy concerns. Competing platform Resy collects similar data but does not share it across unaffiliated restaurants, highlighting OpenTable’s broader data‑sharing approach.