Skip the line: Google fixes wait times for restaurants
Tired of waiting in a line to get a seat at your favourite restaurant?
Google has come up with the answer.
It is rolling out wait times on Google Search and Maps showing us the estimated wait at our favourite restaurants.
The first site to get it will be Google Search. And that will be followed shortly by Maps.
And better still, it’s an initiative that will apply to nearly one million sit-down restaurants right around the world.
Managing it is simple. All you have to do is search for the restaurant on Google and then open the business listing. After that, you just scroll down to the “Popular Times” section.
That will show you the estimated wait time at that particular moment.
Want to see what it will be like at a different time?
Simply tap on any of the hour bars. Doing that will show you the estimated wait for that time period.
And for those who are really picky and who want to see how long they would have to wait at any hour of the day, all they have to do is scroll left and right to see a summary of each day’s wait times below the hour bars.
Doing this would allow you to plan ahead to beat the crowds.
The Google blog says the wait time estimates are based on anonymised historical data.
This anonymised data is taken from people who agree to be tracked via the Google Location History feature that Google uses to target people with better recommendations based on places they have visited.
This is similar to how Google computes the previously launched Popular Times and Visit Duration features.
That way, you can work out whether the cheese bagel and salad you were going to order is worth the wait, or whether your time would be better spent doing something else.
by Leon Gettler, November 9th 2017
