Geeky Traveller

If you’ve just gotten off a long flight and all you’ve had to eat are questionable airline meals and overpriced chips at the airport, you just might be ravenous when you arrive at your destination. Depending on your hotel, you may be able to eat something when you arrive, but not all hotels are the same. One hotel, a place I loved and enjoyed, closed their kitchen by 10 pm and didn’t offer room service. When I arrived at almost midnight, I was hungry but had no food to eat. Luckily I found a great place to indulge in some local food, but OpenTable.com’s website would have been a useful solution for me.

OpenTable allows you to make reservations in advance online. They have thousands of restaurants listed worldwide (including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Japan). On their site, you can search by city, neighborhood, and even type of cuisine. Specify what date you want to eat out and how many people will be dining with you.

The site will search its database and tell you what restaurants are available to you, where it’s located, the type of food, and the general price range. They even tell you which time slots are available that day.

You have to sign up as a member, but once you do so, you can go ahead and book your reservation from the comfort of your home before you even get on the plane.

There are a lot of advantages to this. As I mentioned, if you’re starving upon arrival, at least you know there’s a table waiting for you where you can fill up on some good food. If you’re hosting a business lunch, you can take care of all the details before you’ve left the office, fly out, and just make sure everyone knows where to go and what time.

The Internet is making it possible to do just about anything in advance and it saves you a lot of time on your vacation so you don’t have to waste time trying to find something suitable after you’ve arrived.

3 Comments