GOOD news for diners who wish to dine at Niu by Vikings but do not want to wait in line for their turn to partake of the buffet restaurant’s sumptuous buffet spread: You can now book online and have a table waiting for you when you arrive.
Niu by Vikings, located on the Sixth Floor of SM Aura Premier, has just launched a real-time online restaurant reservation service in partnership with Govago’s ResDiary. This first complete online booking system allows restaurants to get closer to their diners and manage tables more effectively.
Niu, which is the higher-end offering of the very popular Vikings that diners queue up for, has one of the widest selections of buffet food for a very reasonable price. It has nine stations (in keeping with its name, as ‘Niu’ means ‘nine’ in the Viking language) covering all types of cuisines that diners would look for, and, unlike other buffet restaurants, includes gourmet selections such as Salmon Head Hot Pot, Lobster Miso Soup, Lamb, Lechon Belly and, yes, even Foie Gras. It also includes a variety of drinks, multiple carving choices, and an awesome dessert spread.
ResDiary, for its part, is a digitized restaurant reservations management system that serves more than 4,500 restaurants in 17 countries. It eliminates the old-fashioned pen-and-paper reservations system still used by most restaurants in the Philippines to manage their bookings.
“Our goal is to digitize the restaurant industry and allow them to be connected online. If a restaurant is managing all its reservations through an online diary, whether from their website or social media or on a mobile device, they can instantly and in real time check availability. ResDiary even suggests which table to block off for diners who make reservations because it has access to the floor plan of the restaurants it manages.
With the newly launched partnership between Niu and ResDiary, the floor staff will be able to more efficiently manage tables with the help of a table graphic while also sharing information about their customers’ dining preferences.
One of these is the booking widget that can be added to the restaurant’s website, Facebook page and Twitter account. “That will mean that when a customer is calling, the restaurant instantly has the full background knowledge of the customer. They’ll know that this person has been in the restaurant three times in the past twelve months, that she prefers a bottle of red wine, and that her favorite table is Table No. 10,” Ng explains.
ResDiary is looking to expand aggressively in the Philippines and is targeting about 1,000 local restaurants by the end of 2015. Niu by Vikings is one of the first restaurants to take advantage of this system, and, with it, its diners also come out winners because they won’t have to queue to get to a good meal.
