When it comes to having a mouth-watering saucy bowl of pasta or a perfectly cooked North Indian meal, people (including me) are willing to wait in (long) lines for a taste of their favourite comfort foods. To efficiently plan the dinner dates, Google will soon roll wait times on Google Search and Maps that will show you an estimated wait at your favourite restaurants.
To see wait times at restaurants around the world that allow walk-ins, just search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing, and scroll down to the Popular Times section. There you’ll see the estimated wait time at that very moment. A pop-up box appears that shows live or historical data labeled as “busy,” “usually busy,” “usually not busy,” etc., along with the wait time.
And by tapping on any of the hour bars, you’ll see the estimated wait for that time period. You can even scroll left and right to see a summary of each day’s wait times below the hour bars -- so you can plan ahead to skip the line and beat the crowds.
Below the popular times chart, Google is also including a section to helps users plan their visit by offering info on the peak wait times and duration. For example, people typically spend 45 mins to two hours, here.
Wait time estimates are based on anonymised historical data, similar to the way Google computes previously launched Popular Times and Visit Duration features, the company said.
In 2015, Google offered mobile web users that tells which days of the week and time of day were most crowded for local businesses using charts that appear in the business listing.
