Booking bots, revisited
Pretty sure we'll always elbow each other out of the way for access.
Booking, then selling, reservations for hot tables at top restaurants is poor form by industry standards, but common enough in practice. The automated bots, working faster than human hands to snap up the most desirable tables, are blamed for messing with restaurants’ customer data, encouraging no-shows, and for blocking the rest of us from ever snagging a table.
Though the proportion of affected restaurants is small, plenty are frustrated by the practice. Resy, in particular, gets a bad rap for bots on its platform, journalist Elizabeth Dunn, the author of last week’s Grub Street piece about reservations in New York, told me.
“I think the reason it seems to be a problem mostly on Resy is probably that most of the restaurants that the resellers are targeting are on Resy,” Dunn said. “I think they’re being unfairly maligned for that one… they’re very invested in trying to fix it and I think they’re prioritizing it.”
As previously discussed in this newsletter, there’s no perfect way around reservations scalping. Or, as Dunn said Resy told her, “As soon as you close a loophole, they’ll figure out a new one.”
Access to certain spaces will always have value, and this practice is unlikely to stop. But that won’t keep the most interested parties — restaurants, reservations services, and new services that say they’re playing by the rules — from trying to cut them off. Here’s where the fight stands for now:
Legislation
New York’s Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act passed with some pomp last year. The law bans third-parties from listing reservations on sites and apps without permission from the restaurant, and resellers can be fined up to $1,000 per violation. It went into effect last week, to the delight of the major reservations players.
“This is a huge win for restaurants and diners in New York – bills like this play a critical role in protecting restaurants from losing revenue from no-shows, while restoring integrity of the reservation process for diners,” Resy CEO Pablo Rivero wrote in a LinkedIn statement last week. “Resy will continue to work with the National Restaurant Association to advocate for similar legislation in other states and federally.”
A similar national ban on the practice — dubbed the Supporting Equal Access to Tables, or SEAT Act, didn’t make it through Congress last year, though the industry may try again. Early this year, the Independent Restaurant Coalition included “reservation piracy” on its list of priorities for the new session of Congress.
Spending requirements
Restaurants have long used deposits, credit card holds, and fees to discourage both no-shows and reservation-flipping. Now some London restaurants are going a step further, instituting minimum spend requirements. Per reporting in the Financial Times, restaurants have instituted the minimums for the usual reasons, including bots, resellers, and so-called “squatters” who book multiple tables per evening with the intention of honoring only one.
They also target a more… modern problem, the influencers who view hot-ticket restaurants as a content-creation checklist.
“Beyond bots, the other culprit that has triggered these required spends are influencers, perhaps the great scourge of our age,” according to Resy co-founder (and current Blackbird founder and CEO) Ben Leventhal.
Tock CEO Matt Tucker, also quoted in the piece, seems to agree. While minimum spends might not be the most hospitable, it’s a result of “influencer culture gone crazy.”
Creative business models
Dorsia, a members app that lets people book hard-to-get tables in exchange for agreeing to a minimum spend, announced a $50 million Series A round of funding last week. An entry-level membership costs $175 annually, but membership costs can reach a staggering $25,000 annually for VIP treatment.
Or, in the words of
’s Emily Sundberg: “if you’d rather pay your way into a restaurant, you’re probably already familiar with Dorsia.”Dorsia isn’t in the business of reselling; it instead works with restaurants, asking them to hold tables for its clientele. (Plenty of restaurants do this for credit card companies like American Express, too, which in turn offers the tables to cardmembers.)
The startup plans to use the new funding, from backers that include Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman and chef and co-founder of Major Food Group, Mario Carbone, to expand. The service reportedly has 125,000 members and 50,000 prospective members with pending applications.
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