NEW YORK - American Express Co. has added an area to its Web site where Internet surfers can make lunch and dinner reservations at more than 1,000 restaurants.
The company is offering the service through a nonexclusive marketing partnership with OpenTable Inc. of San Francisco, which has been developing the online reservation system and signing up restaurants for it since 1999. OpenTable partners with several other companies' Web sites, including America Online and several newspapers. It has no other financial services partners.
Amex will promote the service to consumers at its Web site, and also encourage its client restaurants to participate.
The service is free to consumers, and works like the already popular movie locator Web sites. People choose a city where they would like to dine, and then can sort restaurants by neighborhood, type of cuisine, or price, or look at a list of all the Internet reservations-accepting restaurants in the city. A recent check of Chicago's restaurants yielded a choice of 93 restaurants.
The service also carries reviews of many of the restaurants by the rating service Zagat Survey LLC.
