No Reservations? Look to the Web

The weekend is almost here, and you still don’t have Saturday plans.

Not to worry.

Spend a few minutes online and you can have dinner reservations, movie tickets, museum passes and stadium seats.

That would leave you plenty of time to find a date.

Some sites charge service fees, though, so you might have to shell out for a good time. But you won’t have to spend another evening home alone.

Dinner and a Movie

Even the most traditional of dates can be planned online. At https://www.restaurantrow.com, you can reserve a table at your favorite Italian place and receive an e-mail confirmation usually within an hour. A site search for establishments in Los Angeles returned 1,399 listings among a wide range of restaurants--from California Pizza Kitchen to Musso and Frank Grill.

Including menus, directions and reviews, the site is a good source for researching restaurants, but it charges a substantial fee for its reservation service. Registered users pay $7.95 a month or $22.95 every three months for unlimited service. Non-registered users pay $4.95 for each reservation.

Open Table, at https://www.opentable.com, provides the same service for free. But its selection is limited, featuring only about 60 restaurants in the Los Angeles area. Although Open Table does not charge for its service, you must submit a credit card number to hold a table. Under its user agreement, you must cancel reservations online or by telephone at least 30 minutes in advance. If you fail to show for a reservation without canceling four times in one year, the company will close your account.

So you don’t have to rush dinner to catch a late-night movie, sites such as https://www.moviefone.com and https://www.movietickets.com let you buy movie passes online before they sell out at the theater. You can search both sites by movie title or theater location, pick a flick and purchase your tickets with your credit card for pickup at the box office. The only major difference between the two sites: Movie Tickets’ 50-cent-per-ticket surcharge is slightly less than Movie Fone’s $1 surcharge.

Should you decide to stay in for the evening, you can rent DVDs online at https://www.netflicks.com. For $19.95 a month, Netflicks will send you as many as three movies at a time via first-class mail. When you’re done with a film, mail it back to the company, and Netflicks will send another one of your choice. The site, however, is not much help with last-minute dates since it takes a minimum of three days to receive your first rental order.

Museums

For those with more sophisticated tastes, the J. Paul Getty Museum offers online reservations for parking, lunch and dinner at https://www.getty.edu/visit/planning/reservations.html. The site also includes a calendar with listings of upcoming events for which you can reserve tickets online.

It processes requests and sends e-mail confirmations usually within 24 hours of submission, so plan your trip at least a day in advance. Parking reservations are not required on weekends or after 4 p.m. during the week. Unlike many other online reservation forms, it does not require any credit card information.

Reservations for events at other local museums can be made at https://www.museumtix.com, which offers tickets around the country. Although it includes information on several Los Angeles museums--such as the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the Japanese American National Museum and the Skirball Cultural Center--it offers tickets only to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and its special events.

Run by CitySearch.com, the site also includes information from the company’s other Web sites. A search for museum events in Los Angeles, for example, returned listings from https://www.boattix.com. A search on Boattix returned a few boat charters by Catalina Express but also included a series of Cary Grant films to be shown at LACMA.

Although you can order tickets on Museumtix for pickup at LACMA, there is a $2.75 surcharge--more than one-third the cost of some adult admissions.

Athletic Events

Sports fans planning an outing online might have to watch a game rather than play it.

Although many golf sites claim to offer tee-time reservations, none seems to do so in the Los Angeles area. The Golf Network’s service, at https://www.thegolfnetwork.com/home/tee_time_reservations.asp, includes only one local listing for a course in Anaheim--and it doesn’t accept online reservations. None of the dozen area courses listed on https://www.reservationsource.com accepts online tee times either. The site does include phone numbers, though, so you can call to schedule a time. Even https://pgatour.book4golf.com/home lacks Los Angeles listings.

Both https://www.dodgers.com and https://www.angelsbaseball.com, however, sell home-game tickets online. Both also charge service fees. For other athletic events, check out https://www.ticketmaster.com, but be prepared to pay the surcharge.

Because some online reservation and ticket forms can take several minutes to fill out--and sometimes longer if the site requires you to register and create a user name and password--picking up the phone and calling the establishment to secure your reservation might be faster.

You can’t waste too much time, after all.

You still have to find a date.

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Christine Frey is a freelance writer.