We’re really getting into this online booking mallarky here at EdinburghMenus.com HQ. We’ve already added the ability to book tables online at restaurants in Edinburgh using toptable.co.uk and 5pm.co.uk. This is great as not only do you not need to pick up the phone to book a table (good for when you’re at work!), but you also get to take advantage of the special offers toptable and 5pm.co.uk have negotiated.

The only slight problem with booking through toptable and 5pm is that they are a middle man - they contact the restaurant on your behalf and you get confirmation of the booking a little later. This works well and 99% of the time there is not a problem, but wouldn’t it be perfect if you could get immediate confirmation that your table is reserved just as surely as if you phoned the restaurant yourself?

Well now you can! You know how lots of restaurants have fancy electronic reservation systems that manage all of their bookings? We’ve teamed up with one of the companies providing that service to lots of Edinburgh restaurants to provide an instant online booking system that immediately saves your booking into their reservation system, making it impossible for your table to be reserved for anyone else. This system works really nicely, and is currently in use by some of Edinburgh’s busiest and most highly regarded restaurants like Vittoria, La P’tite Folie, The Stockbridge Restaurant, Creelers and Britannia Spice.

New special offers section

As a number of the restaurants that use our direct online reservation system also have 5pm and toptable offers, to stop the listing pages getting too cluttered with options for how to book your meal, we’ve moved a lot of the offers off the main part of each listing page - they’re now listed down the side of the page. To make up for this, we’ve created a whole new special offers section. This also allows you to easily see only the businesses that currently have special offers running and you can also list them by proximity to any location in Edinburgh. We think this is going to be a popular feature!

We’ve got another exciting partnership to tell you about today - it’s now possible to book tables online at over 80 restaurants in Edinburgh on EdinburghMenus.com through toptable. This is great news - toptable is the largest online restaurant booking service in Europe and sports big names such as Alex Ferguson and Gary Rhodes amongst their shareholders.

Along with the partnership we already have running with 5pm.co.uk, it’s now possible to book online at almost every restaurant in Edinburgh that has an online booking facility from EdinburghMenus.com. All the businesses where it’s possible to book a table online have been tagged with “bookonline” so they can be searched for easily or if you just want to see all the toptable businesses, they’ve been tagged with “toptable” too.

A few of the toptable businesses also have special offers available when you book online. We’ve been getting our hands dirty with SOAP (hahaha) to pull in these toptable offers using their API as we do with the 5pm offers. So you can browse all the available offers from toptable and 5pm without leaving the comfort of EdinburghMenus.com! There’s loads more we can do with toptable’s excellent API (like checking for table availability) and we’ll incorporate this into EdinburghMenus.com when we get a chance.