Fresh off a Valentine’s Day sugar high for the restaurant industry at large, Yelp announced strong growth in its restaurant services offering, including a record-setting V-day week where its reservation and waitlist software assisted 5.6 million diners.
“This momentum is the early result of Yelp’s long-term strategy to acquire and integrate leading restaurant technologies into Yelp and offer a seamless dining experience for both restaurants and consumers,” said Devon Wright, general manager of Yelp Restaurants Marketplaces.
In the last year, Yelp added a Kiosks product to streamline digital and physical restaurant management processes. According to its own data, diners seated through the Yelp app return to the same restaurant twice as often as other diners, and its wait time algorithm is claimed to be nearly twice as accurate as host estimates.
The company added that its restaurant partners have reported that the company’s other product innovations are having a positive impact. Through the company’s partnership with Grubhub, food orders and takeout on Yelp hit a new record high and grew by 27 percent in Q4 2018 from the previous year.
