Continuing a steady and successful rollout of its cloud-based reservation system, Timothy Ryan, President and Director of Eveve U.S. operations, announced that Eveve has surpassed Urbanspoon as Open Table’s leading U.S. competitor.
Entering the U.S. market only 5 months ago, Eveve focused on the Twin Cities as a test market, and the initial efforts surpassed all expectations as well as garnered heavy investor interest.
Not only did Eveve beat Rezbook’s most recently published numbers, but it took a significant bite out of industry giant OpenTable’s market share.
“Eveve now processes over 20% of all Twin Cities online bookings,” Ryan explains, "even though OpenTable flew in top brass to try and stop the exodus.”
OpenTable lost some of its “most booked” restaurants (Bar La Grassa and Hell’s Kitchen) to Eveve. The emerging company also won accounts from award-winning establishments such as Barrio, Meritage, and other notable names.
“The fiercely independent operators were key to us, because they understood it’s not just that we cost far less; it’s also about actually gaining online booking,” Ryan states.
“The facts have borne out: restaurants that take their own reservation system in-house usually are happily surprised to see an immediate increase in bookings. Once they realize how many of their own customers were being lured to competitors with all the offers people see on OpenTable’s home page, the picture became far more clear, and thus these restaurant owners weren’t enticed by ‘last minute deals’ from OpenTable to get them back.”
Until Eveve came, the Twin Cities had been OpenTable’s top market, followed closely by Washington DC. Even more significant is that Eveve has only been in the U.S. for five months, focusing initial efforts in their test market of Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN.
Eveve surpassed Urbanspoon’s claim to 18,000 covers in November and projects reservations of 27,000 this month.
“We are very pleased to have become the leading US challenger to Open Table in such a short time, proving a hungry market for an alternative that can actually increase the number of bookings,” says Eveve’s Ryan.
“We will have 50 restaurants in the Eveve family next month and we look forward to announcing our U.S. expansion plans after January 1st.”
Established in 1997, Eveve has been a technology leader since 1997 and entered the restaurant market in 2007. Eveve currently has relationships with approximately 1,100 restaurants worldwide.
