Introduction to Availability Scanning
Availability Scanning is the second part of the Distil Diagnostics engine, designed to help restaurant groups maximise reservations and grow revenue. To learn about the first part of Diagnostics, see Forecasting.
Availability Scanning makes it faster and easier for central support leaders to identify why a restaurant is unavailable for online reservations.
This information typically sits within each OpenTable restaurant profile (restaurant ID or RID), which can make it time-consuming for large groups to review every site individually. Distil brings that data together into a single set of screens so support teams can spot issues and act quickly.
Distil Diagnostics and Availability Scanning are currently available only to restaurants using OpenTable.
How Availability Scanning works in Distil
Availability Scanning uses data from each OpenTable RID and compiles a detailed summary of when blockers exist and why a venue cannot accept online reservations at specific times.
A summary is available in each weekly view selected from the horizontal week menu at the top of the screen. More detailed site-level and service-level information is available through the Availability view.
Every restaurant is scanned every 15 minutes, and the reasons for non-availability are returned in the tool.
The data is presented in two ways:
Availability Scanning: Summary View
In the Weekly Summary View, the Availability Scan overview appears on the right-hand side of the screen.
Each row shows how many slots are unavailable for a given party size.
In the example below, party size 2 has 2+ hours where a table for two is not available across the restaurant group. Hover over the result to see a summary of the reasons. In this example, the reason is "No times exist".
From the summary view, users can click highlighted non-availability periods to drill into the restaurants affected by a blocker.
Reasons for No Availability
Restaurants may show no availability for reasons other than being closed. These include:
- No times exist
- Blocked
- Above max party size
- Too far in advance
- Not far enough in advance
Availability Scanning: Weekly View
In the Availability Weekly View, the details pane shows restaurants down the left-hand side with a 24-hour timeline across the page.
Colour Key
- Grey: The restaurant is closed.
- Green: All selected party sizes are available.
- Red: One or more selected party sizes are unavailable.
The Day Tab Bar
Across the top of the details pane, the Day Tab Bar shows each day in the currently selected week.
The number shown next to each day is the number of restaurants that match the current filters for that date. In the screenshot example, the user would expect to see 9 restaurants listed each day.
Filters and Controls
- Mouse-over hover: Shows the reasons why a cell is marked as available or unavailable.
- Party size filter: Use this dropdown to show only restaurants with unavailability for the selected party size. Minimum and maximum party sizes are defined during onboarding.
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Unavailability filter: Use this dropdown to reduce the number of restaurants shown by filtering out sites with only small periods of unavailability.
- 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 restaurants with unavailable blocks between 1 and 2 hours.
- 2h+ - Show restaurants with unavailable blocks longer than 2 hours.
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