Online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has teamed up with NCR Corporation, a point-of-sale systems provider, to expand mobile payments to the reservation app.
OpenTable’s mobile app has had millions of installations on iOS and Android, which allows customers to flip through and reserve tables at restaurants with a few taps. The company has expanded its footprint so much that Priceline bought the company for $2.6 billion last year, after OpenTable logged in 15 million diners per month with a focus on the US.
Now Priceline is expanding OpenTable’s functionality to help it become a one-stop-shop for restaurant reservations and payments, again bringing together mPayments and real-world transactions in the form mobile proselytizers have been promising for years.
The integration will just require diners to register a credit card with the app, allowing the transactions to pass from restaurant to app to credit card issuer without any real-world interactions between diner and server. The service is currently available in a few test locations, but OpenTable says the service will be nationwide by the end of the year.
This is probably only the beginning. When Priceline bought OpenTable, many noted that the travel company probably had plans to expand the app internationally.
That global expansion hasn’t happened quite yet, but it could—and with the power to offer mobile payments and reservations, it will be that much easier to get people around the world to adopt the service.