Intro

My name is Layth Sudairy and i am a co-founder of artofdining.net and i love to welcome you all to our new blog.

In the original planning of artofdining.net, a review section was planned. A place where we could write our own opinions about various aspects of the restaurants, as well as a section for our members to ad their own reviews. Yet along the way an aspect of a deal with an already established review website made us freeze that thought. We hoped we can achieve some type of complementary agreement with that website.
Obviously as everyone notices from our site, that deal never happened and we were too far forward in our web development to unfreeze the review section idea. Therefore we came up with a bit of a different idea now, a blog. It might be a real bad idea, but we at artofdining.net love to try everything. After all we launched a website where people can make reservations online! 'Why would anyone do that?' , is the question i hear the most after explaining what we do. I thought it was self-explanatory; it is a great service. u click couple of buttons and u already booked a table ii your favorite restaurant, all you wait for is an email or an sms that says 'your table is booked'. 'but why don't i just call them?', is the next question i hear. That is the harder question, I can even ask many international hotels and restaurant reservation websites the same thing. My simple answer: 'it is cheaper, actually it is free'. I personally think it is faster too. I don't have to redial if it is a new restaurant that always has a busy tone. Think of 'Burger Boutique' in Riyadh, such an instance where you think can i find some way to make my mobile redial faster when busy!!
Yet in our first, second, and third business plan we specified a unique goal with artofdining.net, and it was not just online reservations, our goal was to provide a unique service, one that is a fusion between online reservations, and Condé Nast service. Off course we are not expecting to be an all-out concierge service, but maybe just for restaurants we can be. So we launched couple of additional services, BB PIN reservations (where you can make your reservations directly through the BBM), an exclusive international restaurant recommendation email service, as well as couple of interesting newsletters such as 'hidden treasures' and 'Events'. I know many of you dont know about many of these features.
It is our fault, for we have lacked in our marketing and information department. We have been focusing on our sales department the last couple of months. After all we need to be able to sustain this company. No i will not be discussing the other question 'How do you make money?" let us keep somethings for ourselves after all :)
Riyadh has been our testing ground, and we thank all of our members for being part of this test. We did great so far: no reservation problems, no unattended requests. on the other hand with restaurants it has been difficult. The idea of an online booking does not seem to be understood or appreciated. So our struggle with restaurants continues. Few such as the Sheraton Hotel, and Pizza Amore, I enjoyed working with; for they seem to be the progressive ones, understanding the value of such service.
I will wrap this up now and both Mohammed Al Rashed, and I as the founders hope to start a relationship between us and our members. A relationship that can make artofdining.net flourish with your ideas, and feedback.