Union Square Hospitality Group Transforms Its Restaurant Experience With Apple Watch

What Happened
Union Square Hospitality is bringing wearable tech into the hospitality industry as it plans to equip every floor manager and sommelier with an Apple Watch when its Union Square Cafe reopens in Manhattan next month. In a partnership with startup Resy, managers will receive taps on their wrists as timely but subtle alerts whenever a VIP walks through the front door, a guest waits too long to order her or his drink, or a menu item runs out.

What Brands Should Do
This initiative serves as an interesting use case for restaurants and hospitality brands to leverage wearables to improve their customer service. The kind of discreet notifications smartwatches offer can keep managers in the loop without disrupting the customer experience. More hospitality and retail brands should consider exploring similar opportunities to modernize their on-premise customer service.

 


Source: Eater

nEmesis Engine Tells You Which Resturants To Avoid

A new system developed at the University of Rochester aims to give users genuine opinions about a restaurant before you commit your money. Called “nEmesis,” their software uses machine learning to listen to geotagged tweets that match a restaurant location. It follows that user’s tweets for 72 hours, and captures any information about them feeling ill. Though it’s not good at accounting for random bouts of the flu amidst genuine food poisonings, over a four month period it correctly identified 480 reports of food poisoning. So maybe before you risk that C-rated lunch spot in NYC, check out nEmesis to see what’s really going on.