Heaven knows the business of restaurant reservations could use a serious makeover. Tim and Nina Zagat say they are working on it.
Yesterday the owners of the best-selling Zagat Survey guides introduced their new Web site featuring an unprecedented “diners’ bill of rights” at the “21” Club. They also forecast future link-ups with restaurants.
While that day might no come for a couple of years, visitors who register at http://www.zagat.com can now vote online and access ratings and reviews for 20 cities, a number planned to expand to include 45 locales. Browsers can also conduct a power search to pinpoint restaurants by location, cuisine, ratings and price.
And they can vent their gripes by contributing to the writing of the “diners’ bill of rights,” a first draft of which includes the right to not tip if dissatisfied with service and the right to smoke-free and cellular-phone-free seating. The Zagats intend to present the updated bill to restauranteurs at a conference this summer.
Temporary memberships will be free until September, when a decision is to be made on whether to charge for the service. Registrants gain access to full reviews, maps and driving instructions. They can also vote on a restaurant and put it in their diary. Those who do not register can still tap into lists, locations and ratings.
The popular burgundy guides can be purchased online too, leading the way for the possible sale of restaurant merchandise later, such as cookbooks and china. And the Zagats might start publishing out-takes (with restaurant names omitted) on the Web site son – comments that are too libelous to make it into the books.
Tim Zagat says, “this is going to give us a whole new way for people to tell us what they like. It does a lot of things we can’t do in our books.”
Surprisingly, the Zagats expect their soft-cover sales to increase with the wider audience of the Internet. “People can’t carry a computer out on the street,” reasoned Zagat. They also anticipate a surge in the number of voters, as now surveyors can vote at any time of the year and don’t have to wait for the familiar ballots to arrive in the mail.