Dive Brief:

• Booking Holdings announced that it will acquire Venga, a guest management platform for restaurants and other businesses, according to a company release. The company's technology allows its partners to personalize the diner experience and will be integrated with OpenTable. 
• The acquisition will let restaurants using OpenTable to create a customer profile, including dining preferences, order and spend history, and additional notes from prior experiences that can be accessed by all locations using the same platform, per a company blog post. 
• Once Venga is combined with Guest Center, OpenTable's flagship hospitality solution, restaurant clients will be able to view how their emails perform, track social media campaign performance and understand ROI for all channels. 

Dive Insight:

With Venga's data consumer data capabilities under its belt, OpenTable just became a lot more formidable. 

The deal will fully combine the platform with OpenTable's structure, and give partner restaurants access to more detailed diner information, including food preferences, social media profiles and other specific eating habits or dining preferences, according to Skift Table. The two companies have worked together in a third-party capacity since 2014, but this merger will help OpenTable fully unleash Venga's capabilities. 

The move comes just weeks after another strategic initiative from the reservation platform. In March, OpenTable updated its client agreement to bar restaurants from giving diner data to other platforms without paying a fee. Since then the industry has speculated that OpenTable is attempting to freeze out SevenRooms, which uses data from OpenTable's partner restaurants. 

The Venga acquisition ramps up this data war, and could discourage operators from turning to SevenRooms for their data analytics needs when they can access these capabilities through OpenTable itself. After backlash following its client agreement changes, OpenTable moved to allow SevenRooms integration to its system if restaurants pay a fee. 

The reservation platform has been vocal about its plans to become a one-stop restaurant solutions shop, and Venga appears to be a savvy stepping stone. In today's cut-throat restaurant segment, knowing how to collect and analyze data well can help restaurants vault to the head of the pack, which is also being threatened by third-party delivery aggregators that siphon that data.