Restaurant.com—rip-off or real savings? Part 2

Posted by Bill on Saturday, April 11, 2009   |   No Comments

I posted recently about Restaurant.com, the much-hyped restaurant gift certificate service. It works like this: Log on to www.restaurant.com and search for restaurants in a state, a popular destination city or your local zip code area. Once you find one to your liking, buy the certificate online, print it out and take it to restaurant to enjoy both the food and the savings.

If you recall, I worked through an example at local eatery Pasta Pasta, one of our favorites. The long story short is that it didn’t turn out to be much of a deal. In fact, it was pretty much a wash. So let’s try another example. Let’s say we are going to Mangia Mangia in downtown Kalamazoo as part of a group of five.

Here the $25 gift certificate will cost me $10, and it still requires me to spend a minimum of $35—really not a problem with five people. Let’s say that we would normally spend $150 on such an outing. To this we will need to add the mandatory 18% gratuity. This makes it $177. The $25 certificate cuts it to $152, but we have to add the cost of the certificate which is $10 in this case. So now we’re back up to $162.

If we had no certificate and voluntarily paid a 15% gratuity instead of the mandatory 18%, the total bill would be $172.50. So in this case, the savings would be about $10. I worked it with lower total figures, and it usually came out at about $10 less. Not bad and probably worth doing. But read the fine print. When you do, it will tell you that you cannot use the gift certificate on Fridays and Saturdays. Hmmm. What are the most likely evenings to go out to dinner with friends? When I consider this restriction, it looks like a come-on again.

Okay, I’ll admit these are hypothetical scenarios. But what do real reviews from users of this service tell us? Here are a few headlines from online reviews:

“Restaurant.com is a scam!!!”
“READ THE FINE PRINT.”
“Works for me—for now.”
“Be careful.”
“It seemed pretty overrated to me.”
“Good idea, poor support.”
“Great service. Great prices.”

Of the 23 reviews I read, 12 awarded the service only one or two stars on a five-star scale. Four reviewers gave Restaurant.com three stars. The remaining seven thought the service deserved four or five stars. Some of the reviewers complained of the certificates being sold out. Others warned potential users to check their credit card statements carefully. Apparently some users have found hidden charges, and at least one reviewer said coupons were offered for restaurants no longer in business.

As with all such reviews, it pays to take them with a grain of salt. My personal approach to evaluating reviews is to watch for trends. A handful of awful or great reviews don’t really tell the story. To me the real skinny is in the pattern. What do the majority of them say? I’m not saying that Restaurant.com is not a valuable service, but in all honesty, I don’t think I’ll be using the service. You decide for yourself.

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