- Michael Gebert
- Next
After reading Nick Kokonas’s fascinating 6,000-word manifesto-slash-case study for the ticketing system he devised for Next and Alinea, the reason you’d want to do something, anything, to do shake up the existing order becomes clear. As he says, “Three full-time employees answering phones, mostly to say ‘no’ to potential customers since 70 percent of people request the same times: Friday and Saturday prime times. This was costly payroll, costly phone lines, and, most importantly, frustrating to the callers. Saying ‘no’ to a potential customer is never a good thing.”
Nevertheless, for his and Grant Achatz’s restaurants, the data Kokonas shares shows that the system has been a smashing success. First up is a chart showing how ticketing reduced no-shows for reservations. No, not reduced, decimated, from over 100 in March 2012 (preticketing) to barely 20 in March 2013 (post-ticketing). This is a big problem for fine-dining restaurants, where people planning business meetings will make two or three reservations for the same night to give their bosses a choice of the city’s best. The traditional method for high-end dining has been to take a credit card to guarantee the reservation—and then not to charge it anyway. As the GM of another top restaurant admitted to me, you just can’t do that and risk making so many future customers mad. The ultra-high-end dining universe is too small.
In some ways this was the most innovative use to date of the ticketing system—as he observes, “People commit to spending at least $20, $35, or $50 but they get that at the same price as any other customer. They are committing to showing up . . . but not paying a premium for access.” That’s giving the customer something perceived as having value, essentially for nothing (as long as they actually show up) while making the restaurant more money in the end.
