Mother’s Day is coming up on May 8th, and as everyone in the industry knows, it’s the busiest day on the calendar for restaurants. If you are planning to treat Mom to a meal out, it’s never too early to think about reservations. This is especially true if Mom has been hankering a visit to one of the most popular eateries in town.

Trouble is, most of us leave the decision making till the last minute and then find ourselves locked out of the places we would most like to visit. Sensing an unserved niche market, a company based in Los Angeles has been thinking through the reservation dilemma pretty thoroughly. In fact, they’ve made a business out of it. For a $40 feed on your credit card, WithoutReservations.biz will make sure you get a table at any of the most popular restaurants in L.A, New York or San Francisco, even if Procrastinator is your middle name.

That 40 dollars however, only gets you the reservation. You still have to pony up for your meal on top of that.

When announcing the web business’ arrival, the The New York Post took a pretty dim view of the whole idea. Their February 2005 article entitled “Why Get it for Free When You Can Pay?�, noted that many top New York restaurants still had vacancies available up to a couple of days before Valentine’s Day (the second busiest restaurant day of the year) and that people who booked reservations for a romantic meal through the site were merely panic suckered.

However, in an web blog interview (now offline) with Amy Langfield, a New York-based freelance writer, Doug James, the co-founder of WithoutReservations had this to say:


Amy Langfield: When – and why -- did you start operations?

Doug James: We started thinking about this business a year ago, but we really didn't start operations until the beginning of January. The site went live on February 4th. The main reason we started the site was because it's a great idea: For one, it gives discriminating procrastinators a last-minute chance to get a great table at sold-out restaurants during special dining-out occasions. And it also provides restaurants with a diner who's already committed to the reservation, safeguarding restaurateurs from one of their biggest problems: no-shows. (No shows on big-nights are actually a bigger problem than you'd think ... restaurants stand to lose more money than on typical nights because of special menus and pricing, and diners who think that far ahead often book tables at multiple restaurants only to cancel their back-ups late or forget about cancelling them at all.)


Langfield: What do you do if a restaurant requires a credit card to hold the
reservation? Do you give them a fake one?

James: Are you serious? This is not a scam, it's a business. Every restaurant that requires a credit card to hold a reservation is given a completely valid, legitimate credit card number. Our success relies on the trust of both the restaurants and our customers, so the financial obligation of everyone involved is taken very seriously.


L angfield: Do you think restaurants like this?

James: Once they see that we're accountable, that we don't book multiple tables per restaurant, and that we help ensure on-time diners and prevent no-shows, there's not much to dislike. And even the best restaurants don't mind the free press touting them as one of the most sought-after places in the city.


Langfield: Aren’t you basically making it harder for the rest of us to get a table?

James: There is one person who it's harder for, and that's the first person to call after the restaurant is booked, and they are the first person on the waitlist. If our reservation goes unsold, that person gets the table. And they're probably on the ball enough to have made back-up reservations, unlike "the rest of (you)", for whom we are basically making it easier to get a table. Just go to withoutreservations.biz."