About

What Haila is

Haila is a restaurant reservation platform for Moldova. Diners pick a city, see live tables, and confirm in seconds. Restaurants get a real-time booking pipeline without phone tag.

We launched in Chișinău in October 2024 with two restaurants. By mid-2026 the platform lists over two hundred venues across seven Moldovan cities, with live booking rolling out venue by venue.

How we work

Every signal (Hot tonight, Best tonight, Rising fast, Local love, Hidden gem, Patio open) is computed. No editor’s pick. No restaurant can pay for placement. The numbers come from booking pace, rating, and sector return rate.

Reviews are tied to verified phone numbers and verified bookings only. If you did not book through Haila, you cannot review through Haila.

The team

Sole founder Alex Smirnov, working from Chișinău. Engineering, product, partner ops, currently a team of four. Hiring nobody full-time until we hit fifty venues. We will not raise outside money this year.

What we are not

We are not OpenTable. They take a cover commission of around €2 per diner; we never will.

We are not TheFork. Their UI is built for discount-hunting; ours is built for confident booking.

We are not Resy. Resy NYC is editorial-heavy: Hit List, Pizza Nation, the lot. That requires a writer. We do not have one and we will not have one.

Origin

The name is Moldovan colloquial: "haila" means "let’s go." It is the word you say when you want to be somewhere five minutes ago. It is the voice we wanted the product to have. Direct, useful, no slogans.