TripAdvisor has a midweek snack, acquires restaurant-booking service LaFourchette for $140M

Restaurant reservation services seem to be all the rage this week. Yesterday fancy-bookings app Table8 announced a new cash infusion, and today TripAdvisor announced its acquisition of LaFourchette.

Though TripAdvisor already had a partnership with this “OpenTable of France” company, it has apparently agreed to acquire LaFourchette for about $140 million, according to a report.

LaFourchette, which operates in France, Switzerland, and Spain, provides online reservation software, consumer-facing apps, and APIs for third-party developers to help restaurants increase their business and make better use of their data.

The company claims to have 12,000 restaurants in its network.

LaFourchette’s main competitor is OpenTable, and the acquisition is likely to help the company reach the scale necessary to take on its competitor by leveraging TripAdvisor’s resources.

LaFourchette is TripAdvisor’s third meal course in the past week: It acquired London-based travel recommendation community Tripbod on Monday and Boston, Mass.-based Vacation Home Rentals last Thursday.

LaFourchette previously raised $10.5 million in 2012 from Serena Capital and Partech at a valuation of more than $65.8 million.

(via TC)