Gone are the days of going and waiting in line to get a table at your favorite restaurant. Today, there's an app (or a dozen) for this, just like we do for most things. With just two clicks on a restaurant guide app like Zomato or OpenTable, you can find a place to eat, book a table and even order food.
If you want to know how to make an app like OpenTable and how much it costs, here's a guide based on our experience. Here you'll find some tips and ideas for creating a restaurant finder application that we believe is the best on the market today.
Why is a restaurant table booking app important?
Restaurant table booking mobile applications help in keeping things organized, limiting the number of open tables as well as reducing the waiting time for customers.
Most restaurants are developing and maintaining an efficient and reliable reservation system. It simplifies the process of managing bookings for restaurants and customers can book a table at their favorite food place anytime.
There was a time when the term "open table" was considered a bad thing because of the empty space in the dining room. The restaurant pays for all the utilities, food, rent, staff, etc. and when a customer doesn't show up it's a big loss for the restaurant because they invested a lot of money and end up with zero profit. An app like table reservation in a restaurant reduces this risk by providing information on reservations and saves them from facing loss.
User App Features
Quick Registration – App users can quickly register and sign in via telephone number, email or account on social media.
Profiles- It allows users to manage their profile including membership plan and history of bookings.
Search- The search feature should be mandatory and sophisticated. Users can easily search by recipes, time, ratings, suggestions, etc.
Menu- You can consider this feature in your table reservation application which allows your users to book a table with the original menu with the ability to change some ingredients in the restaurant.
GPS Navigator- You should have a feature that you can integrate into your app to allow users to locate the restaurant easily.
Floor Map- Floor map is basically considered as a floor/seating map where users can reserve seats according to their preferences.
Online Payment– This is one of the most important features that help you provide an excellent experience to your customers. Allow your customers to transact for the meals they have through the reservation application to skip the need to wait for the check.
Discounts- Every food based mobile application offers discounts to their users to retain them. You should maintain this feature to provide discounts to regular users and special offers on some special occasions.
Notifications – They are sent as reminders for reservation confirmation and before the due date.
Renting a restaurant – As a rule, this option is a must if a restaurant can be rented for a birthday party or wedding.
Social Media Integration- This means inviting family or friends on social media to share a booking at a restaurant.
Frequently Asked Questions Section – To help potential customers with questions.
Restaurant application
Sign Up: Restaurant owners can easily register themselves and join the board by providing login details.
Update Profile: Restaurant owners can update their profile like phone number, address and more.
Update restaurant details: Restaurant owners can update restaurant details like menu, visiting hours, table booking times and more.
Table Booking Information: Restaurant owners can check the booking details of customers name, members, time etc.
Schedule Timing: Using this feature, restaurant owners can schedule their dining time for visitors or table reservations.
How much does it cost to develop a restaurant table booking app?
App development cost depends on many factors and hence it varies from one app to another. The cost of developing a table booking app depends on the features and technology used in developing it. Also, other factors like geographical location of app developers, hours invested in app development and experience of growing companies play a role in table booking app development cost estimation.
Read More: AI Use Cases in Food and Beverages
After going through all the steps required to develop a restaurant reservation app, here is the estimated cost based on the hour invested by our developers to build your app:
- Before starting to design and develop an app, research and market analysis are very important. It takes at least 40 hours to do the research.
- Designing the UI is the most crucial step in developing an app like Dining Out. We also provide you with an app prototype to make sure we are going in the right direction to develop your app. Both UI design and app prototyping takes about 120 hours.
- Code is very important to develop an app like dineout, code development is one of the longest processes of app development. Estimated code development time is 240 hours.
- App development is the longest and most important feature of developing a restaurant booking app. App developers have to make changes again and again to meet the client's goals. Estimated hours for app development is 480 hours.
- Web and app testing is done to find bugs and improve the app as much as possible. A minimum of 40 hours is required for the exam.
- To develop a restaurant table booking app, around 920 hours are required. We charge a minimum of $25 to $40 per hour to develop an on-demand table booking app.
Cost to develop an on-demand Restaurant App is around $40,000 - $50,000 for a single platform, if you outsource it to a Mobile application development company in frisco, it will cost you around $25,000 for a single application.
Making a Restaurant App: Conclusion
Restaurant app development is more complicated than it seems at first glance. But it is not too difficult for an experienced team. We bring you our vision of the challenges and possible solutions. If we haven't covered a specific issue about how to build a restaurant guide app like Zomato or OpenTable, contact us with your queries.
