Yelp will soon let you wait in line at restaurants virtually

Don’t you hate it when your favorite restaurant doesn’t take reservations, and you have to wait in line for 30 minutes? With Yelp’s $8 million investment in Nowait, things are about to change.

Yelp announced its partnership with Nowait in its second quarter earnings call and will be bringing us an option to put our names on restaurant waitlists without having to go in physically.

Nowait is a Pittsburgh-based company that lets you browse nearby restaurants (within 60 miles, to be precise) and their wait times before leaving your house. You simply tap on your phone to put yourself on the waitlist, and Nowait notifies you when your table is ready. If you’re running a bit late, you can even text to let the restaurant know. How convenient is that?

Currently, there are around 4,000 restaurants that use Nowait’s services including Chili’s and Kerbey Lane Café. In an interview with TechCrunch, Nowait’s CEO Ware Sykes said that Nowait’s services will come to Yelp in the coming months.

This partnership has multiple benefits. It helps us by enabling us to drive more traffic to our restaurants and it allows us to bring the Nowait experience to as many consumers as possible.

Sykes says that his company’s priority is introducing existing Nowait restaurants to Yelp users, but with Yelp’s investment, Nowait will be able to expand its services even further. It seems like both companies could benefit from this partnership since Yelp may see an increase in the number of users, and Nowait could expand its services beyond restaurants.

After all, according to Yelp, only 18% of reviewed businesses on Yelp are restaurants. Waiting in line could be a thing of the past not just for restaurants but also for places like hair salons and walk-in clinics.

If you are already a Yelp user, do you think this partnership will be useful for you? Let us know in the comment section below!