WalkIn: New app lets Londoners get table at restaurants that don't take bookings

After waiting over an hour for brunch, a pair of Londoners dreamt up an app which they claim will "do for restaurants what Uber did for transport".

Amos Teshuva and Frazer Harper, both 28, thought up WalkIn while in the queue for brunch at the Breakfast Club. The new app allows diners to queue remotely for restaurants that typically don't offer reservations, including Eggbreak, Flat Iron and Padella.

The duo recruited technology developer Archie Kennedy-Dyson, 24, and set about work on creating the app, which they claim is now helping 125,000 people a month get a table without waiting.

Amos Teshuva, co-founder and CEO at WalkIn, said the firm’s aim was to “stop queueing in London.”

Speaking to the Standard, Teshuva said: “10 years ago if you wanted to get a taxi you either had to book one in advance or manually go out and hail a black taxi. Then Uber came along. WalkIn is going to do for restaurants what Uber did for transport.

"Bookings constantly fail to show up, which means busy restaurants have had to make people wait in line to avoid empty tables. Not because the restaurant wants to, but because they have had to. WalkIn is changing that by giving restaurants and diners all the benefits of bookings with none of the drawbacks of no shows. We want to get to a place where people no longer have to spend hours waiting outside a restaurant getting bored and tired. We want to stop queueing in London.”

For 40 restaurants including Pastaio, Pizza Pilgrims and Din Tai Fung, users can join the queue via the app, from up to 2 km away. They plan to extend this radius in the coming months, and while other apps exist where diners can join the queue from outside the restaurant, the team believe they are the first in London to offer remote queueing.

Their technology puts remote diners on the waiting list for a restaurant. When the table is ready, they receive a push notification, as well a text, and have ten minutes to get to the restaurant before the table is given away.

The app is being used by 1,000 Londoners every month, with the team saying they have saved users 36 million minutes of queueing since inception. The team are aiming to have seated 2.5 million diners by the end of the year.

Restaurants often refuse bookings in order to avoid empty tables and the loss of revenue from no-shows. However, WalkIn data suggests restaurant takings are typically up 15 per cent per night thanks to their app.

Jonathan Arana-Morton, Co-Founder of The Breakfast Club, said of using WalkIn: “As soon as we started trialling WalkIn at one of our sites, the impact was immediate with a significant like-for-like increase in sales from day one.”