Inside Yelp’s Approach to Working with Restaurants

Yelp’s restaurant business, driven largely by its robust and popular review site, has grown to encompass many aspects of font-of-house restaurant operations, from wait list management to reservations and table management, diner loyalty, CRM, and, obviously, reviews, and ratings. As part of Skift Table’s larger look at the new reservations landscape, we sat down with business and corporate development SVP, Chad Richard, for a look at how a business that got its start in user-generated content has evolved to become a resource for the restaurant business. “Three years ago what we had to offer restaurants was so different than what we do now. Yelp has always been an amazing place to promote your restaurant, but it wasn't really helping you run your restaurant,” he says. With 5,000 restaurants in U.S. and Canada on Yelp Reservations, they’re still scratching the surface of a huge industry – competitor OpenTable has 43,000 restaurants. Richard admits that well-rated restaurants