I caught up with cofounder Ben McKean, a Concord native, to find out how it works.
Most people are familiar with Groupon, which offers half-off discounts at restaurants — $50 worth of food for $25, for instance, as long as you pay in advance. Those offers, McKean said, may bring in hordes of new diners, but there’s little incentive to consume more than $50 worth of food at a sitting, and they can overwhelm a restaurant.
With Savored, you pay $10 for a restaurant reservation at a specific time. (Say, 7 PM on a Sunday night.) That gets you a 40 percent discount on your entire bill (not including booze, which cannot legally be discounted in Massachusetts.) “You can save a huge amount of money if you want to splurge,’’ McKean says. “We had someone save $1300 at Delmonico’s in New York.’’ And the discount is linked to your reservation, so there’s no coupon to cough up at the end of the meal. “With coupons,’’ McKean says, “the people at the next table feel slighted because they didn’t know about the discount, and it definitely sends a certain impression if you’re at a business dinner or lunch.’’ (In other cities, Savored offers a 30 percent discount, but that applies to the bar tab, too.)
Savored pockets the $10 reservation fee, and the restaurants with which it works are happy, McKean contends, to fill tables that would’ve otherwise sat empty. “Ninety percent of the restaurants we work with have never put offers on a deals site’’ like Groupon or LivingSocial, McKean says. Most give Savored between 6 and 10 reservations a night. He estimates that the company will help restaurants generate as much as $25 million in additional revenue this year.
Among the venture capital firms that invested $3 million in Savored earlier this year was Grand Banks Capital in Wellesley.
In addition to Boston, Savored operates in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.
