Restaurants That Take Reservations & Travel Reservations
Restaurants that take reservations and travel reservations can be made mostly online. Whether it is an airline, hotel, cruise, dinner, tour, etc., you can do it all online. Normally, we prefer doing most of our reservations directly with the company. We prefer this because if you need to cancel, change, get a refund, etc., we have found it easier to work directly. However, that is not always the easiest way to make a reservation. In general, reservation websites can be classified into three categories: Travel, Things to do and Restaurants. We will briefly discuss our approach to getting great ideas and making reservations.
Restaurants That Take Reservations – Use Google Search
Google search can find some interesting restaurants that take reservations, and they can be made mostly online. Options depending on your inquiry. For example, if you search for “most affordable Michelin or James Beard restaurants in xxx”, you may be surprised to see a pretty interesting list of results.
Michelin endorsements include three categories: Michelin starred, Bib Gourmand and Michelin Plate. Most are familiar with the Michelin Star Restaurants, the best and likely quite expensive. Bib Gourmand includes good restaurants that offer a refined cuisine at an affordable price. The Michelin Plate symbol is given to a restaurant which has been recognized for its quality but may still be working towards a star.
In Australia, Chef Hat Awards designate fine restaurants on a five-category basis and are awarded for a consistent culinary experience. In Australia, restaurants that take reservations online are usually easy to find.
Also, Google maps has a nice search feature once you type in “restaurants” and filter “top rated”. Other options will appear as well as their locations; clicking on the knife and fork tab will bring up information about that restaurant. This includes location, opening hours and reviews, especially nice when in a new place.
We recently discovered that Open Table has partnered with Capital One. Cardholders with enough Open Table Dining Points may get access to the hard-to-get reservations. If you do not have a Capital One card you can search for “Open Table hard to get reservations xxx”. You will see some of the hottest reservations according to their data and local experts that they can book for you.
Restaurants That Take Reservations – Concierge Reservations
In general, when it is offered, we will book a restaurant online or ask a concierge in a hotel to do it for us. American Express also offers a concierge service that will book restaurants and other activities for you. In foreign countries where the person answering the phone at the local restaurant may not speak English, booking online or through a concierge can be very helpful. When booking a restaurant online, we have used four different reservation services: opentable.com, thefork.com, resy.com, yelp.com.
Restaurants That Take Reservations – Niche Players
Each of these services has a particular niche. Open Table and Yelp are very strong in the United States and The Fork is strong in Europe and Australia. Resy is focused very much on the real high-end restaurants. Restaurants don’t always put all their availability on these websites. It might help, particularly with the popular and expensive restaurants that take reservations, to call the restaurant if it is showing no availability on the website as well to learn about cancellations or other openings. Please see Our Favorite Restaurants post for more information about restaurants.
Travel Reservations USA
Travel reservations in the USA use websites that we are familiar with. They can be classified as follows: Vendor Direct, Online Travel Agency, or Aggregator. As we mentioned we prefer vendor direct, but the problem is that if you are first trying to find the least costly airline, hotel, cruise, rental car or other travel reservation, going vendor direct will not be much help. This is where the online travel agencies and the aggregators are very helpful.
Travel Reservations – Online Travel Agencies:
Let’s start with online travel agencies. Here you have a number of choices, depending on what you are trying to do. Expedia Group and Booking Holdings are the two largest travel companies, each having multiple brands, and American Express is the next largest although a third the size of the big two.
Expedia Group owns the following companies:
- Expedia.com
- Vrbo
- Hotels.com
- Orbitz
- Travelocity
- Trivago
- CarRentals.com
- and others.
Expedia.com, Orbitz and Travelocity are all general travel agencies. The others are more specific to a particular niche of travel. We have had general good fortune in using the Expedia Brands both for searching and in certain cases booking. This can be especially helpful with foreign companies that we are not familiar with. The one challenge we have had with Expedia is with cancellations.
With any booking, it can often be difficult to get travel credits or vouchers arranged for travel cancelled by the carrier. This was a particular problem we encountered during the pandemic years (2020-2022). Back then, the carriers were cancelling many bookings and companies like Expedia were overloaded with cancellations. In general, to arrange a credit it is often much easier working directly with the airline or hotel. However, the travel agents can be very helpful with international carriers that don’t have a direct local presence. Usually contacting the foreign carriers can be difficult and it is often better to let the agent deal with them.
Booking Holdings owns the following companies:
The companies are direct competitors to the Expedia Group Brands. We have used Booking.com to book Bed and Breakfast stays and have been very pleased with the results. Robin has used Kayak, although Cos is not overly experienced with the aggregators. We use Open Table, a lot, and will discuss it later.
American Express (amex.com) is a very interesting alternative because they integrate their travel agency services nicely with their credit card features (e.g., loyalty points), and in addition to booking online, you have excellent call center services. In addition to their travel services, they also own the Resy restaurant booking service.
Travel Reservations – Aggregators:
Kayak, Cheapflights.com and Trivago are aggregators. They help users to obtain an overall image of the prices and availability across multiple vendors. Trivago is focused on lodging options. You don’t book travel direct with the aggregator but book through a third party. Like the other airline aggregators, Google Flights is an aggregator that is highly recommended by a number of travel sites. It can be a good way to find and book the lowest cost flights. Aggregators will find information about airlines (e.g., Southwest Airlines) that don’t list their flights with the online travel agents. (For more information about travel agents see our post When to use a Travel Agent).
TripAdvisor which started as a user-generated consumer review travel site, now offers aggregator services. We find the trip advisor reviews to be helpful. However there is a long history of many fake reviews appearing on their website. TripAdvisor says they have corrected this problem. We have found the TripAdvisor recommendations to be generally reflective of the service level of the establishments. Therefore, we put a lot of trust in their reviews. TripAdvisor acquired TheFork, (see below) a restaurant reservation site, and Viator, a company that books tours. Please visit Our Favorite DIY Travel Tours for more information about tours.
One aggregator we recommend is WayAway. WayAway is an interesting aggregator with a search engine focused to find travel deals. They search other sites to find the cheapest travel deals available. They offer an upgraded program called WayAwayPlus. For an annual fee that will give you a 10% discount on any activity that you book with them. Here is a promotion code that will reduce the cost of signing up for the program WayAway Plus.
Finding things to do
Most people will google “best things to do” to get results from Viator, Get Your Guide, Trip Advisor, etc. We have had some unusual tours by searching in Pinterest. For example, not only “best things to do in xxx” but also “hidden gems in xxx”. Strangely, we have found some great places by searching “most Instagram able places in xxx”. This way you might find an out of the way alley that leads to something very interesting.
