[lqet]

You better also have a UK phone number ready!

We had a nice family vacation last year in the UK (beach town in Wales). One day, we wanted to make reservations in a restaurant just a few blocks away. This was only possible by calling them. They asked for my phone number, then replied: "Sorry, is this a UK number?" When I said no, we are tourists here, the reply was that they could not make reservations for us, sorry! Same experience with two other restaurants.

We ended up preparing some hamburgers from Aldi UK that evening.

[dwroberts]

This is not a normal occurrence and to be honest it’s surprising that these places had no way to book online

[dcminter]

A year or two ago I had a similar issue booking to see a Broadway show in NYC... baffling because surely a large percentage of their custom is international tourists. It must have been some kind of temporary glitch, but we had to do something else in the end.

[null_deref]

Such a strange behavior did you find out what the reason was? I bet this is not a secret deal with the phone service providers

[lqet]

We assumed that they charge some kind of penalty fee if you do not show up via your phone number, and this (most likely 3rd party) system only works with UK numbers.

[roryirvine]

There's no such service, and it's very unlikely that there ever would be given the attitude of the UK telecoms regulator.

There are things like premium rate phone lines (which you can dial for entering competitions) and special SMS short codes that allow you to send small amounts which get charged to your phone bill (typically used for charity campaigns - eg. "Text 'GIVE £5' to 71234").

But both of those systems require you to take specific action - there's nothing that would allow someone else to apply a charge to your bill on your behalf without your direct involvement. OfCom would have kittens if anyone were ever to suggest setting up something like that.

It's likely that the restaurants in this case were simply confused by a number starting with a + rather than a digit.

[Ylpertnodi]

It's probably to be able to text you 'your table is ready' kind of thing.

[Apofis]

eSIM apps are available on the app store where you can purchase an eSIM in any country these days.

[aembleton]

I've never got a number with them though. I know some of them do, but not all. I did find an app that gave me a voip number when I was in Canada which was handy.