Introduction to Availability Scanning
Availability Scanning is the second part of the Distil Diagnostics engine that’s designed to help restaurant groups maximise reservations and therefore grow revenue. Follow this link to eead more about the first part, Forecasting.
Availability Scanning is designed to make it faster and easier for central support leaders to pinpoint the reasons why a restaurant is unavailable for online reservations.
Typically this insight is held in each restaurant profile (restaurant ID or RID) in OpenTable, so it can be a time-consuming process for a large restaurant group to check and manage each one individually. Availability Scanning in Distil compiles and concentrates the data into easy-to-use screens that give central support leaders the insight they need to take action.
Distil Diagnostics and Availability Scanning is currently only available to restaurants on OpenTable.
How Availability Scanning works in Distil
Availability Scanning uses data from each restaurant ID (RID) in OpenTable and compiles a detailed summary of when and why blockers exist that are restricting a venue from accepting online reservations for certain times.
A summary of the Availability Scan is available in each weekly view, selected via the horizontal Week menu at the top of the window. Further detail at a site and service level are available via the Availability menu item in the sub-menu.
A scan of every restaurant’s non-availability is made every 15 minutes, and the reasons for the non-availability are returned in the tool.
There are two ways this data is shown in the platform.
Availability Scanning: Summary View
In the Weekly Summary View, you will see an overview of the Availability Scan on the right hand side of the screen.
Each row shows how many slots are unavailable for that particular party size.
In the example below, you will see that for party sizes of 2, there are 2+ hours where a table of 2 is not available for reservation across the restaurant group. Using a mouse hover over, the user will see a summary of the reasons pop up - in this example, no times exist.
From the summary view, a user can click into any of the highlighted non-availability to drill down further into exactly which restaurants have a blocker.
Reasons for No Availability
The reasons a restaurant might have for showing no availability (other than the restaurant is closed) are:
- No times exist
- Blocked
- Above max party size
- Too far in advance
- No far enough in advance
Availability Scanning: Weekly View
In the Availability Scan Weekly View, the details pane shows restaurants down the left hand side and a 24 hour period across the timeline.
Colour Key:
- Grey: The restaurant is closed.
- Green: All selected party sizes are available
- Red: One of the selected party sizes is unavailable
The Day Tab Bar:
Across the top of the details pane there is the Day Tab Bar, which represents the days of the week in the week selected from the horizontal weeks menu across the top of the screen.
The number on each tab, shown next to the day, is the number of restaurants listed for each day that meet the criteria in the filter. In the screenshot example, the user would expect to see 9 restaurants shown each day.
Filters and Controls:
- Mouse-over hover: this shows all the possible reasons why that cell is either marked as available or unavailable.
- Party size filter: use this drop down filter to show only restaurants that have any unavailability for the selected party size. The minimum and maximum party sizes are defined during onboarding.
-
Unavailability filter: use this drop down filter to reduce the amount of restaurants shown by filtering out restaurants that only have small patches of unavailability. The options here are:
- All → Show all restaurants for the selected party size and unavailability reasons
- < 1 Hour → Show restaurants where all unavailable periods are shorter than 1 hour
- 1h - 2h → Show the restaurants that have unavailable blocks of 1-2 hours long
- 2h+ → Show the restaurants that have unavailable blocks of more than 2 hours long
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