By Daniel Alexandre Portoraro, MBA in Hospitality Management, Canada/Italy, 2014-2016 2nd Year
Last
week, IMHI had the pleasure of hosting Olivier Thierry, ESSEC alumnus, COO and B2B Director of
La Fourchette, as part of the fifth installment of the Industry Leader
Conferences.
Over
the course of the evening, Mr. Thierry’s presentation veered more towards the
role his company plays, as opposed to the path that led him there. While the
latter would have certainly been interesting to touch upon, this is not to
suggest La Fourchette is anything but an incredibly innovative platform in the
hospitality industry.
In
short, La Fourchette is the Expedia, the Booking.com of restaurants across
Europe. However, unlike Expedia, La Fourchette brings services hitherto unused
by restaurants across the continent.
For
example, while the practice of yield management is a long-standing one within
the hotel and aviation industry, restaurants have yet to be fully exposed to
it. La Fourchette offers restaurants to take advantage of revenue management by
offering guest discounts (sometimes, as much as 50%) during down time.
In
addition to this, La Fourchette also replaces the dusty, biblically-sized
reservation book. As mentioned by Mr. Thierry, “in this book, you have an
incredibly wealth of information; from names to phone numbers to culinary
tastes and table preferences. Yet, at the end of the year, this reservation
book is often thrown away by the restaurant, or set aside in some dark corner
and remains untouched.” La Fourchette seeks to replicate all the benefits of
the reservation book while packaging them in a lightweight, easy-to-use digital
format.
Naturally,
there are a lot of services which can justify the fees La Fourchette charges
participating restaurants; they can take advantage of revenue management
principles, can reach a new audience, and most importantly, develop an
invaluable data bank about their guests.
That
said, we’ve heard this before, especially those in the hotel industry. Already,
some customers ask themselves why if one week they can buy dinner at a
restaurant for 40% off the list price, they must pay the full amount the next
week at a more popular booking time. In order to quell this frustration, or
rather, confusion (which both the hotel and airline industries went through),
La Fourchette is going to great pains to make its system as transparent as
possible.
In
addition to this, however, it remains to be seen if all the value La Fourchette
brings to restaurants will soon pose to be a problem for various eateries.
After all, hotels were once happy to have OTAs help them reach out to new
customers, but as anyone following the industry today knows, the war is often
between operators and these travel agents, as opposed to between the operators
themselves. Is it possible that ORAs (Online Reservation Agents) such as La
Fourchette will eventually occupy the same invaluable place in the supply chain
that Booking.com and Expedia do? It may appear so. And as we’ve seen, the
strength of OTAs can incite firms such as Marriott to acquire major hotel
players such as Starwood. It will be interesting to see how the restaurant
industry will react, and more importantly, evolve.
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