Room Booking Mosel

VillageVines: Dining Discount Site Tries a New Name

The former VillageVines dining site is betting on a new name and expanded scope to enhance the popularity of its Hotels.com model of restaurant reservations.

The site has changed its name to Savored and added five new markets. It is also offering Zagat rankings for the site’s participating restaurants and reviews from Travel & Leisure and New York Magazine.

Unlike other restaurant sites, users pay $10 per booking to make a reservation on Savored.  Then, when patrons dine at the restaurant, they receive a 30 percent discount off their bill — food and alcohol combined. (Savored keeps the fee; if the discount it arranges doesn’t at least save you the fee, the company refunds it).

Users make the reservation and then show up; they don’t need to bring a coupon, although the site does suggest that patrons “remind” the host or hostess that they reserved through Savored, to get their automatic deduction at checkout.

“If a hotel has an empty room, they put it on Hotels.com at a lower price,” said the site co-founder, Ben McKean. “If a restaurant has an empty table, they put it on our Web site and offer 30 percent off.”

The site already offered tables in major culinary destinations like New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington. It is now adding Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami and Denver. The site’s list includes more than 500 restaurants. (In Boston, the site offers a 40 percent discount on food only, because state law prohibits giving discounts on alcohol.)

In New York, the site includes restaurants like the Capital Grille, Jean Georges, Le Cirque and Aquavit (which offers a 25 percent discount), Little Giant and Dinosaur BBQ.

Many restaurants, especially those serving expense-account diners, don’t like to participate in coupon-type plans, Mr. McKean says, so the discreet automatic deduction Savored uses is attractive to them. Although the discount the restaurant must offer is hefty, it is far less than the 50 to 75 percent some businesses end up giving on daily deal sites that have become popular, so it’s a more attractive proposition for the restaurants. “These are still very profitable diners,” he says.

The tradeoff with Savored is that, because restaurants are looking to fill tables on slow nights and times, there might not be any reservations available at your top choice on the night you want to go out.

A check on Monday morning showed that Kittichai, a Thai restaurant in New York’s Soho neighborhood, had tables available early in the week. The Capital Grille caters to the Financial District crowd, so it offers tables only on Friday and Saturday nights, when Wall Street types are elsewhere. Little Giant shows tables available only on Sunday and Monday nights. And just two midweek nights were listed as available at Dinosaur BBQ in July.

U.S.Mayors Seek to Plug Tax Evasion By Online Travel Companies

The resolution claims that OTCs such as Expedia, Priceline, Travelocity, Orbiz and Hotels.com are collecting state and local hotel occupancy taxes from consumers but only remitting a fraction of such taxes to state and local governments. It claims that the alleged evasion is costing a minimum of US$1 billion in lost taxes.

The resolution is one of 114 approved by the annual  U.S. Conference of Mayors held in Baltimore between June 17-20. It comes within the broader context of frustration over the state of U.S. cities, the need for billions of dollars to fix the problems and the funding shortages caused by the massive U.S. budgetary deficits.With urban revival and job creation a major mayoral priority, the annual conference passed a number of the resolutions directly related to travel and tourism, an industry which is seen as having the potential to create one million new jobs by 2020 if easier visa processing and stepped up marketing programmes are implemented.

It called for the issuance of a presidential directive to help the U.S. recapture 17 percent of the global long-haul travel market and match Western Europe’s current share in the Brazil, China and India markets by 2015.

Other resolutions backed the Obama Administration’s High Speed Rail Initiative to connect 80 percent of Americans to high-speed rail in 25 years, and sought more federal funding for the arts, humanities and museums.

While seeking more funding from the federal government, the resolutions also fingered the private sector, which is quick to demand better infrastructure and tax concessions, but is also quick to exploit opportunities to evade taxes itself. The OTCs were singled out as a clear example.

Said the mayoral resolution, “Many hotels contract with OTCs in order to increase the occupancy of their hotelrooms, and provide OTCs a discounted rate for each room they book online. The OTCs charge consumers the full retail room rate when booking a room online and collect state and local hotel occupancy taxes based on the full retail room rate, and they typically charge consumers a processing fee.

The OTCs also collect taxes based on the full retail rate that the consumer pays for the room, but they only submit to state and local governments hotel occupancy taxes based on the discounted rate of the room. They pocket the difference.

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