Davy, the founder of Distrito Francés, has two venues in the center of Paris, the first one in the 10th arrondissement and the second one in the 3rd. In the heart of Le Marais. The idea is to present the Mexican street-food cuisine to the Parisian crowd, but always with a fusion touch.
Davy; "Before, we used another solution for reservation management at Distrito Francés, and we were not comfortable with it. We couldn't integrate our brand into it, and it was a partner who would take all of our guests' data and keep it, we didn't see what they were doing with it. Another thing that was bothering us was the "intrusive" aspect: when people would look up the restaurant and see the first result, they were on top of the search results without warning us and without giving us control over it. This is something that, with Formitable, we were able to solve because everything is linked to our restaurant and not linked to another provider.
An aspect that differentiates Formitable from its competitors is its startup energy. Every new aspect of the restaurant business that can be useful to a restaurateur, Formitable is thinking about it, developing it, and making it available to us.
Hesitant about online reservations
"At first, we were hesitant about online reservations because there's a very obscure side to it: creating a widget seems super complicated. Integrating it into our system and then getting the information seemed super-complex; at least I'm not an IT guy, so I don't have the knowledge of developing a tool, so it felt like a mountain to climb. But since we integrated Formitable, which took us less than a week, it's just so simple that the moment we put it online, I thought, "damn, we lost so much time before this."
From a chaos of reservations to a streamlined flow
"Before Formitable, our reservation management was a shitshow. That is for real; it was a mess. Because people were booking everywhere. They would send us messages on Instagram, on Facebook, book by email and by phone, so we had to juggle with all those channels, catch a reservation here and there, sometimes people would book last minute by email. We tried creating a widget on our website to integrate it, but it wasn't clear enough; people were booking Distrito Francés but was it Distrito Francés in St-Martin or Distrito Francés in Le Marais they were booking? We couldn't know and were becoming a little crazy to the point where we decided to stop reservations. It was becoming too complicated to manage and stressing everyone out, so we tried to limit them. I think we have more for less now. We're paying less and have so many more functionalities, making it attractive to work with."
About Distrito Francés
| @distritofrances | |
| Location | Paris, France |
| Website | www.distritofrances.fr |
