Descriptions vs. Reality

I’ve written several times about some of the restaurant stuff I’ve been doing this year – and I now have my bookings sorted through to October – but there’s been one thing that’s bugging me, which I addressed a bit yesterday.

Some of the restaurants use OpenTable for their booking system – which is understandable, it must make life a lot easier to have all that side handled by someone else.

OpenTable offer a “points” system, so that after a certain number of meals booked through themselves, one can get a discount card/voucher etc.  They specify it as “points with every booking made through Open Table”…

They say the same in two different places on the site

Only that’s not actually how it works. I’ve made several bookings – and honoured them by going to the restaurants and having the meals – and earned a grand total of sod-all from them.

So yesterday – having made yet another zero points booking – I got in touch with them, asking how they justified saying “Every booking gets points” when it was so blatantly untrue.

Initially they came back saying “Oh, that’s only for bookings directly through OpenTable, not for when you’ve come through from another site”. So I tried another booking for the same restaurant, but direct through the site. Lo and behold, still zero points. So I got back in touch, and basically said “Bullshit“, with added screenshots and history to show the progress.

I’ve now had a further reply that can be summed up as “Oh shit. Yeah, there’s been a problem. We’re looking into it“.

It’ll be interesting to see if things do get fixed. For now, my account has been credited with the missing points, and we’ll see what happens with the upcoming bookings as well (the next one is happening this weekend) but at least they’re now aware of the problem.