Member Info for ART123

https://www.opentable.co.uk/manchester-restaurants

Bournemouth is small-time compared to London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and other large English cities. Revenue should increase dramatically if Big Dish can get big numbers in the big cities.

Bournemouth figures in comparison:

https://www.opentable.co.uk/dorset-restaurants

Tiien Thai and The Crab are both on the Big Dish app and are not even the most booked in Bournemouth.

https://www.opentable.co.uk/i/edinburgh/edinburgh-restaurants

https://www.opentable.co.uk/g/london/west-end-london-restaurants

Open Table meanwhile is the exception - neither discount card or yield management - but they have upwards of 25,000 restaurants signed to their platform with 12,500 bookable at any one time.

The restaurants pay for the booking, and I'm sure they pay a lot more than 50p per head.

Half the restaurants have no discounts at all and yet according to the figures on the App they are still taking up to 100/150 bookings per day at some of the busier places.

To be honest their App makes all the 50% off all day places look a bit cheap.

The TM's were able to sign 20 a month and they would only have got better at it. If Aidan wasn't such an arrogant swine he would re-recruit them, and the south-west TM as well.

If the Manilla team had worked out how hard it is to find decent outbound telesales persons they might have kept the 2 TM's onboard. They could do the job very well. It is this arrogance that I dislike about Aidan. How dare he just sack them when they were doing so well.

They may have added another 80 restaurants in the last 2 months which isn't far short of the total achievement of the 10? man telesales team (111).

I keep thinking that I am going to make an absolute killing with this share - and then the reality kicks in that, unfortunately, the directors and the Manilla team don't have a clue.

They are pigging useless.

There are a lot of incentives for operating the full levels of discounts, one being that at 10% discount Big Dish can get the £1.50p per person booking fee.

No, the 30% has also turned up on one restaurant in Bournemouth, 1 in Edinburgh and 1 in Sheffield.

I am not too sure whether it is a higher discount than the 25% or a lower discount than the 50%.

The issue here, and why the directors here are so poor, is that this is all about getting the reataurants signed to the platform. It is not the time to worry about the customers but is all about making the Big Dish App/website somewhere the restaurants want to be. The attraction of Yield Management and why it is meant to be the second generation to the discount card option is that the restaurants can vary their levels of discounts to suit the day, time of day, etc.

There has to be something unique for Big Dish to become an option for the restaurants and without the varied discounts there isn't one. In fact, they are a worse option for the restaurants as they have to give the same offers but also pay the booking fee themselves instead of the customers paying it.

The restaurants would be rushing to sign with Big Dish if they were letting the restaurants offer the full range of discounts form 10% to 50% and letting the restaurants set their own levels.

As it is the restaurants could equally say "why sign to Big Dish, we have all that already with Tastecard and others and with those Apps the customers pays the booking fee. Why should we have to pay it".

And the restaurants don't have to go through all the hustle of paying lots of 50p's and £1's to Big Dish all the time.

And while I'm at it, since I'm not worried about what I post having reduced my holding, I always wondered where the 3 level discounts came from. I now see that is the way the discount card companies operate - Tastecard, Gourmet Society, Table Now. They all do the 25%, 50% and 2 for 1. They also don't offer discounts on Friday, Saturdays, December or any other busy time - ie Bank Holidays, Valentines, etc.

This is not the way Yield Management operates. If you look at Eatigo and Discoeats they offer the full levels of discounts - 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 30%, 35%, 40% and 50% but do not offer 2 for 1 deals. They offer discounts 7 days a week, 365 days a year subject to opening hours because the restaurants are quite happy to offer seats at the busier times provided the level of discount is reduced - and also as the restaurants can set the level of discount themselves within the given parameters.

Big Dish do not know which model they are operating. They seem to have the worst of both at the moment - they do not have the card membership cash and they cannot get all the extra weekend bookings as a lot of their restaurants just say "No seats available" Fridays and Saturdays as they haven't got the reduced discounts to offer.

I think that the telesales team are doing a great job so far considering they have to sign restaurants to a platform that makes the restaurant pay the booking fee and not the customer but also insists on the same restaurants giving whopping big discounts. There isn't any great incentive to attract the restaurant the way Big Dish operates.

My chart looks diabolical by the way!!!!

Weekly numbers have been 15, 29 and 45 for the last 3 weeks but so far this week we are on for a drop. We are certainly not heading for a rise to say 60 for the week. Let's see where we are at the end of the week.

I got carried away here as usual and had bought far too many to be comfortable. I have now reduced my holding to a more sensible level to take into account the rather muted progress, lack of tech skills and continuing bad management decisions.

I will buy more if things start to improve - but they will need to improve considerably from this very average start to the telesales. 111 restaurants added in 8 weeks is poor.

Adding 40 restaurants in say Brighton is going to increase revenue and downloads as word spreads around and the diners use other restaurants on the App but adding 40 restaurants in 40 different locations isn't going to improve anything. As usual there is a lack of management supervision here and a lack of common sense.

There has also been a lot of ramping going on here which is not really being backed by the telesales performance so far. They need to up the numbers to 20 a day if they have a 10 person team at work.

That's still short of the 11 last Tuesday. This needs to go upwards rather than downwards or sideways.

At this rate it will take over 60 weeks to get to 3000 restaurants - not taking into account holidays, sick, etc.

I was hoping to see the numbers here ramp up. Figures put on here recently show that to get anywhere near adding 2750 restaurants in 6 months they need to be adding at 105 per week or 458 per month. That would actually be quite a lot more as nearly 2 months have passed already with only 111 added in that time.

I was hoping to see this head on towards 20 restaurants per day but instead the numbers here seem to be going into reverse already. That hasn't taken long. 20 for Monday and Tuesday last week and now only 13 for the 2 days this week.

Weekly numbers have been 15, 29 and 45 for the last 3 weeks but so far this week we are on for a drop. We are certainly not heading for a rise to say 60 for the week.

Someone uses the App and likes it and then eats out another location on the App or tells friends and family about the App and they try it. With 1 restaurant per town and city they will never use it in the first place.

If I see any more 1 locations added I will scream. I wish they'd kept the 2 TM's on board as at least they could have shown the telesales team how to do the job correctly.

This sort of App will never work with isolated restaurants. It needs big numbers in one location. Look at Eatigo who claim to be seating more than 1 million diners per month. They have 5250 restaurants in just 15 cities. That is an average of 350 restaurants per city.

There is no bigger put off than Big Dish finally coming to a town or city near you and the diner looks at the App and sees 1 restaurant. It looks very amateurish.

I am cross that the website hasn't been sorted out yet. Are the tech team blind? They have to add the restaurants to the location list so how could they not see that the available list does not include all of the locations and that it does not scroll downwards. Pathetic.

Also on the subject of locations, anyone with a smattering of geographical knowledge will know that some of the locations are incorrect.

Bushey (which I've never heard of) needs to be merged into Watford, Fleetwood to me needs to become part of what most of us who live in the UK know as Blackpool, Livingston is another little known place that needs to merge into nearby Edinburgh, and finally Thame is not a known town or city and needs to be part of the new location of Oxford (the city) or, for continuity with Cambridge, Oxfordshire.

The rest are fine. Fife is a county, as is Cambridgeshire.

I do not consider I am being overly fussy about this. Users expect a certain standard and continuity and both are potentially lacking.