Big Qs about the future of booking a table

🍿 Just over a year since DoorDash bought SevenRooms and upended the reservations status quo, there's *a lot* of room for change.

photo via Unsplash

A year ago in May, DoorDash announced it would acquire reservations service SevenRooms for $1.2 billion. The deal shook up the reservations business as SevenRooms’s deeply entrenched incumbents, Resy and OpenTable, navigated a rapidly evolving landscape alongside a newly enriched competitor.

SevenRooms launched in 2011. Its founding executives continue to lead the company today, and SevenRooms is operating more or less independently from its delivery giant overlords. (Even under DoorDash, SevenRooms leadership has forcefully criticized its competition.)

But DoorDash is taking advantage of SevenRooms’ role as a reservations and customer relationship management platform, pulling elements of its tech into the DoorDash app. In the first quarter of 2026, DoorDash says the pace of restaurants signing up with SevenRooms has accelerated significantly. The company didn’t share numbers to back this claim but assured investors in May that “Our progress so far gives us confidence to continue investing in these areas.”

The reservations business has entered a new era. I joke (but am also serious) that the DoorDash-SevenRooms deal keeps me relevant as a business writer. There’s a lot of nuance in this story — every time I cover the business for an outside publication, my editors push back with a ton of clarifying questions — and I am in deep.

DoorDash launched its in-app reservations product, DoorDash Reservations, in the fall. It’s live in a handful of US and Australian cities. More recently, it added reservations in London (and, apparently, Dubai) via Deliveroo, the delivery company it acquired at the same time as SevenRooms for $3.9 billion. (Those bookings are called, fittingly, Deliveroo Reservations and they operate similarly to DoorDash Reservations.)

To most outsiders, including Wall Street, reservations are a small part of DoorDash’s overall business. No analysts mentioned them during DoorDash’s first quarter earnings call in May. In fact, investors don’t seem to care too much about the nitty-gritty of the bookings business; Resy only occasionally makes an appearance during American Express financial reports and Booking Holdings hasn’t offered meaningful mentions of OpenTable on an earnings call in longer than I can remember. (Which reminds me that I’m still not sure why Booking owns OpenTable.)

So! A year into this renewed competition, I have some very specific questions about the future of the bookings business and who might come out on top.

I have fewer answers. Let’s discuss.

1. Will the platforms lean into similarities or highlight differences?