Web watch

www.lastminute.com

A new service from this popular UK site allows customers to make restaurant reservations on-line via credit card. London restaurants such as Bluebird, Quaglino's and Zinc Bar & Grill are already using the site to help fill tables and Lastminute.com is looking for more. Restaurants pay nothing to post their late-availability details and it costs diners nothing to make a reservation, but no-shows pay a £10 penalty. The credit-card transaction is between the customer and the restaurant, and the site takes a referral fee of about 8% of average spend on firm bookings only. Crazy not to.

www.cybersausage.guernsey.net

Only two days left of the Oinktober Sausage Festival at Victorianas Bar in Guernsey's L'Atlantique hotel. The support site contains more sausage puns than you could shake a skewer at.

www.harassment-law.co.uk

Lawyers and authors Neil Addison and Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden have created a helpful Web resource for victims of racial or sexual harassment or bullying at work, and for those who have been wrongly accused of such harassment. Although unable to deal with individual cases over the Internet, the site contains links to support organisations and is building up a database of frequently asked questions on the subject.

www.vegnet.co.uk

Anchorage Farm in Preston, Lancashire, is offering fresh vegetables delivered straight to your door packed in a styrofoam ice-box. Users can check their orders through an on-line monitoring system.

www.simplyfood.co.uk

This food and wine site has teamed up with TV's Carlton Food Network to share content and provide cross promotion between the two mediums, making it a formidable contender in the culinary consumer market.

eeh.co.uk

Web pioneer Elegant English Hotels first went on-line back in 1995. This month the London group of three boutique hotels relaunched its site with added bells and whistles. Design, as before, was done in-house by the group's IT manager Sam Maliqi, who has added extensive "virtual tours" of the hotels, right down to individual rooms and en suite facilities. Company president HS Narula said the 360º panoramic views "take all the guesswork out of it" for the group's long-distance customers. In December 1995 Elegant took a mere four bookings, worth £800, through its site. By March this year that figure had reached almost £1m and 40% of its custom is now coming via the Web.

Coming soon...

All the latest news, jobs, features and searchable information from your favourite trade journal. See next week's Caterer for details of our Web site launch.

Next Web watch: 25 November