By Alisha Goldberg - 5.5.2019
Booking Holdings, the parent company of OpenTable, announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Venga, a guest management platform for restaurants and other businesses. Venga’s cloud technology enables its restaurant customers to enhance and personalize the guest experience.
Following the acquisition, Venga will align closely with OpenTable to further improve offerings for its 51,000+ restaurant partners.
OpenTable, which launched its operations in 1999, offering reservations at a limited selection of restaurants in San Francisco, is the largest provider of online restaurant reservations, with more than 50,000 restaurants globally using its software to seat over 120 million diners monthly. The company has grown rapidly through acquisitions and partnerships. Last month, for example, as reported here, OpenTable announced a partnership with Gather, a leading events platform for the hospitality industry to make finding and booking an event a more seamless experience.
The acquisition of Venga will allow OpenTable to further enhance its platform capabilities, offering additional features and functionality. It seems only a matter of time before OpenTable provides restaurants with an end-to-end restaurant management and POS solution that includes payment processing, workforce management, inventory management, accounting and food delivery integration.
Founded in 2010, Venga has enjoyed success with restaurant solutions focused on guest relationship management. Over the past few years, Venga has build out it’s personalization, marketing, feedback, and analytics features that maximize data for “elevated experiences.”
Venga’s technology enables restaurants to track and analyze their customer’s purchases, habits and preferences. Venga Intel Reserve enables users to merge their reservations with their point of sale data to automatically provide guest intelligence for restaurants. Venga Instant Feedback enables guests to provide private feedback from their phone. Venga Engage enables users to connect guests via their phone. The solution provider has built a customer roster that numbers upwards of 1,400 restaurants.
Venga, which has partnered with with multiple restaurant technology solution providers. One example is Upserve. The Venga platform enables data generated through restaurant reservation systems, integrated marketing solutions and guest feedback platforms like Yelp and Facebook to be funneled into the Upserve POS and used to generate guest-specific intelligence, has been an OpenTable vendor partner since 2013.
Following the acquisition Venga will reportedly retain its own brand identity and also remain located in its Washington, D.C. headquarters. Booking Holdings’ other online travel and related services brands are KAYAK, priceline.com, agoda.com, Rentalcars.com. OpenTable was acquired by the Priceline Group (now Booking Holdings, Inc.) in 2014 in an all-cash deal for $2.6 billion. Terms of the Venga acquisition were not disclosed.
