OpenTable and The Los Angeles Times in Partnership To Bring Online Restaurant Reservations to LA

Business Wire, Oct 10, 2000

Business/High-Tech Editors

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 10, 2000

Latimes.com to Provide Los Angeles Residents and Visitors With

OpenTable's Real-Time Restaurant Reservations

OpenTable (www.opentable.com), the online restaurant reservation network, and latimes.com, the online edition of The Los Angeles Times, are teaming up to allow consumers to book reservations at restaurants in the LA and Orange County areas at Calendar Live on latimes.com (www.calendarlive.com), Los Angeles's most comprehensive Web resource for local entertainment news and information.

Under the terms of the agreement announced today, the two companies will build a co-branded Web site that will contain content and restaurant reviews from The L. A. Times, and OpenTable's restaurant search and reservation engine. In addition, The Times' restaurant reviews will be incorporated into www.opentable.com as part of OpenTable's continuing effort to enable consumers to easily make more educated dining decisions.

Calendar Live on latimes.com has the largest searchable database of entertainment services in the Los Angeles area with more than 2800 restaurant listings. OpenTable offers consumers the benefits of real-time online reservations at hundreds of the nation's best restaurants, without waiting on hold or waiting for restaurant business hours. Consumers who make reservations online earn OpenTable Points, which can be redeemed for dining cheques that work like cash at any OpenTable member restaurant nationwide.

"Beyond the valuable restaurant information available on latimes.com, consumers will now have the ability to use the information they gather to make free OpenTable dining reservations without picking up a phone," said Jeff Edwards, OpenTable's CEO. "We're pleased that latimes.com shares our enthusiasm for helping people make the most of their time online."

According to latimes.com's General Manager, Steve Barth, "Providing a great online experience for our users is our number one priority. We are excited to extend our current offerings on Calendar Live to now include the convenient services that OpenTable brings to our Site."

About OpenTable

OpenTable is dedicated to harnessing the power of the Internet for restaurants and providing dining consumers and hospitality professionals with the best possible reservation experience. The company's proprietary electronic reservation book (ERB) introduces revolutionary customer relationship management, marketing, and yield management tools, as well as real-time online reservations, to the restaurant industry. OpenTable has strategically partnered with leading Internet and media companies including America Online (AOL) Digital City, OracleMobile.com, The Chicago Tribune's Metromix.com, The New York Times' NYToday.com, the Los Angeles Times' calendarlive.com, and The Boston Globe's Boston.com. OpenTable's customers include more than 1100 of the nation's top restaurants. The company is backed by leading venture capital firms Impact Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital, as well as American Express. OpenTable is based in San Francisco, California, and has offices in fifteen cities including New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington DC. For more information about OpenTable or its online restaurant reservation network visit www.opentable.com or call 1.800.OPENTABLE.

About latimes.com

Calendar Live (www.calendarlive.com), latimes.com's comprehensive online entertainment site and city-guide, is one of the most informative and functional online city-guides on the Web. Calendar Live offers more than 40,000 searchable places to go and things to do throughout Southern California. Calendar Live on latimes.com was named the best entertainment section in the 1999 Eppy Awards competition sponsored by Editor & Publisher Interactive.

Latimes.com is one of the leading sources for national and international news and information on the World Wide Web, and the primary source of news and information for and about Southern California. Latimes.com has more than 50,000 content pages and some portion of the site is updated every two minutes, making it one of the most comprehensive news sites on the World Wide Web. Every day more than 3,000 stories are uploaded to provide readers with all of the day's news. In addition, users have access to a million stories from past issues of The Times available in the latimes.com archives. Latimes.com is a Tribune Interactive Company, one of the largest sources of interactive news and information services in the country.