Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

Diogo Monica -

I love food. This means that I'm bound to compete for reservations at good restaurants with the hipsters that are native to San Francisco. This is a peek into the arms race going on in restaurant reservations right now.

TL;DR: Get the code to make automatic reservations at any Urbanspoon restaurant here.

State Bird Provisions

About a year and a half ago I fell in love with State Bird Provisions (SBP for short). The restaurant is nothing short of spectacular. Unfortunately, SBP got noticed by the San Francisco foodie community. This meant that the reservations page started to consistently return the following status:

No reservations are currently available. Reservations are taken online up to 60 days in advance. As tables become available, they will be shown here.

Quick and dirty

One day I sat down, sshed into my remote server and wrote the following chron job (of which I am not proud):

#! /bin/bash
url="http://rez.urbanspoon.com/b/widget/2086?background=ebf3fd&
border=bbd4f1&header=000&link=0144a7&locale=en&source=selfhost&text=000"
hash=`cat /tmp/state_bird`
`curl $url | md5sum | awk '{print $1}' > /tmp/state_bird`
newhash=`cat /tmp/state_bird`
if [[ "$hash" != "$newhash" ]]; then echo "Reservations page just changed: 
http://statebirdsf.com/reservations/ - $newhash" | mail -s Reservations EMAIL; fi

If you ignore the part where this code is utterly crappy, you can see that it actually sends out an email every-time the reservation page changes. I set it to run once a minute, and I let it run.

With this quick hack I learned a few things:

  • New reservations open around 4am.

  • People wake up at 4am to get reservations.

  • At 5am most of the reservations were gone.

  • Once a reservation got canceled I would get an email and could quickly get it for myself.

This meant that I would either get reservations for 60 days in the future, or I would get a random draw of same-day or next-day reservations that would come from last minute cancellations.

Escalation of Violence

After a while of running this script I had captured a good amount of data. One day I found myself looking at it and noticed that as soon as reservations became available on the website (at 4am), all the good times were immediately taken and were gone by 4:01am. It quickly became obvious that these were reservation bots at work.

After a while even cancellations started being taken immediately from under me. It started being common receiving an email alerting of a change, seeing an available time, and it being gone by the time the website loaded.

Leveling the playing field

You fight fire with fire, so I made my own reservation bot. You can get the code here.

I used mechanize to create a simple ruby script that goes through the process of checking for available reservations (in a given time range) and making a reservation under your name.

With this script I was able to start getting reservations again, but I know that this bot war will continue to escalate. Expect future posts on how I will adapt my strategies as the arms race continues to heat up.