Google launches restaurant "wait times" feature on Search, Maps
Love eating out, but tired of waiting in long queues before getting a seat at your favorite restaurant? Well, Google heard your woes! The tech giant has introduced a new feature to help you "skip the line" at popular restaurants. People can now see average wait times for nearly one million restaurants around the world on Google Search and Maps. Find out more!
Users can plan better to avoid crowds
While the restaurant wait times are currently available on Google Search, the feature would soon be available on Google Maps, said the search giant. Apart from estimated wait times in real-time, the latest tool will also show how long people have to wait for getting a seat at a particular hour at any restaurant. Google says users "can plan ahead to beat the crowds."
"Avoid a wait entirely"
On Google's blog, Google Maps' Software Engineer, Quang Duong, wrote, "Now you can decide whether that cronut is really worth an hour wait or plan ahead to get your fix at a time when you can avoid a wait entirely."
How to access the new feature?
Users simply need to search for their favorite restaurant on Google and open its business listing. After scrolling down to "Popular Times", they can see the estimated wait times at that particular moment. Additionally, by clicking on the hour bars, users can see the wait time for a different hour. It also displays the weekday-wise summaries of the wait times below the hour bars.
Know how busy a restaurant is!
For restaurants, Google will show the "live" wait times and "busy" data in a small window in "Popular Times" section. At a given time, it displays whether the restaurant is "busy," "usually not busy," "usually busy," "usually as busy as it gets," etc. Users also get a summary of how long customers spend at the restaurant on average and even during peak hours.
Old feature, new industry
Google said, "Wait time estimates are based on anonymized historical data, similar to how we compute the previously launched Popular Times and Visit Duration features." It is similar to how the wait time estimates for other businesses like grocery stores, shopping malls, museums, bars, etc. are calculated. Google launched search cards showing the "busiest times" for public places and businesses in 2015.
Yelp, NoWait introduce similar feature
Online business listing and reviews company Yelp introduced a similar restaurant "wait times" feature earlier with the help of NoWait online reservation company's technology. Yelp acquired NoWait for $40-million in March this year.
