Pour one out for Tock

Tock restaurants move to Resy this summer. The brand will be gone, but its tech will live on.

Two years after buying reservations platform Tock for $400 million, American Express is sunsetting the reservations brand to juice its other reservations brand. This summer, the thousands of venues that use Tock will move to Resy, uniting 25,000 venues under one provider. I covered the news exclusively for Fast Company today — read it here — in a story that also explores the broader evolution of the business of booking.

Tl;dr: it’s about access.

In a couple of interviews over the last week, Resy CEO Pablo Rivero stressed, repeatedly, that the move would create a much better booking and discovery experience for diners while leaving all Tock’s functions — deposits, ticketing, special events — intact. Tock restaurants will still use Tock’s software to manage their reservations and tables; the only noticeable change will be a logo switch to Resy. (Oh, and, “new demand coming from new channels to drive more business to them,” Rivero, a polished CEO who’s spent over a decade of his career at the financial services company, reminded me.)

Tock’s sunset is a decisively… corporate ending for the brand, once a lean startup taking — and often landing — punches against its rivals. As Rivero talked me through Amex’s plan to consolidate partner restaurants under Resy’s banner last week, I couldn’t help thinking about Tock’s early days, circa 2014, when it launched as a ticketing platform for restaurants and marketed itself like it knew better than everyone else. (To be fair, the ticketing and prepayme

nt model worked great for some restaurants, particularly the in-demand, tasting-menu type destination spots that saw their no-shows reduced to almost none.) Tock’s founder, Nick Kokonas, was an outspoken character in the burgeoning restaurant tech business — I knew I was in for an earful each time I saw his name light up on my phone’s screen. I have no complaints — I’ve always loved a good agitator. You’ll have to read my Fast Company story for details of Tock’s OpenTableSaurus stunt, still one of the best stories from the earliest days of what we’re now calling the “reservation wars¹.”

Tock, sold by Kokonas to Squarespace in 2021 for $400 million, was never really meant to be a consumer brand — it was a tech company for restaurants. I hear that its restaurant partners still feel this way; as I reported today’s story, more than one restaurant told me they long trusted Tock to address their specific concerns, make product changes and upgrade features. They felt heard, in other words, and hoped the same support would continue under the Resy flag. (Execs say it will.)

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The coming consumer-facing Resy-Tock consolidation is part of a larger push at Amex to (finally) unite its restaurant inventory with its popular credit cards, providing more perks to card members — and attracting new ones.

In September, Amex added a popular $400 Resy credit to Platinum cards; diners get a $100 statement credit per quarter when dining at a Resy restaurant. (Some Tock restaurants will start to become eligible for the credit this summer.) The credit has proved remarkably popular; as I wrote in Fast Company, in the three weeks following the announcement, there was a 36 percent increase in Resy reservations made by users with a U.S. Platinum card linked to their account—and a 5X increase in the daily average number of accounts being linked. It was not a coincidence that this dining credit was announced at the same time American Express raised its annual Platinum card fee by $200. (Amex apparently saw serious demand for the cards, higher price and all.)

Sixty-five percent of new Amex card members are Millennial or Gen Z consumers; the average age of a new Platinum customer is 33.

“We’re thinking about our cards like — we are moving on from being a card company and moving into being a membership company,” Rivero said. “The card is your vehicle to access the company, but once you access that, you have membership benefits that come with that product.”

All of this sounds great for people with an American Express card… but what about everyone else? You don’t need to have an Amex to use Resy, Rivero reminds me; anyone can sign up for an account, save favorites, set a notify alert. Still, he said, “Amex and Resy work better together.”

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Eventually, Resy will consolidate its restaurant-facing tech into one platform, offering all restaurants access to the same software. The company has been working to integrate the tech since the Tock acquisition.

(In a recent and mostly unrelated conversation, I asked Resy co-founder and former CEO Ben Leventhal if it was hard to go from leading a nimble reservations startup to working inside a $220 billion financial institution, post acquisition. “Amex’s pace may at times seem slow, but ultimately they are in the business of getting it right,” he told me. Fair point.)

“Hospitality tech acquisitions and consolidation is not simple, especially for us, where it’s two front ends on the consumer side and two back-end technologies on the operator side,” Junaid Shams, American Express chief operating officer of global dining, told me in an interview. (Shams was the co-founder and CEO of Rooam, a payments platform also acquired by Amex in 2024 and announced at the time of the Tock acquisition.)

Shams says the team is pulling the best of Resy and Tock to build the new system. “It’s been a very detailed process, but the output that we have here is something very unique and something very exciting for our consumers,” he promised.

I’ve heard anecdotally that Tock has better restaurant-facing tech than Resy; I pushed Rivero to agree but he wouldn’t. “I honestly think it’s going to be the best of both worlds,” he told me.

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The reservations business looks and feels a lot different than it did a decade ago. The stakes seem higher, even though its function is effectively the same: diners want a (great) seat at the table, and restaurants want to fill their chairs. Deep-pocked industry players are courting increasingly tech-savvy restaurants and writing huge checks to win their business. A delivery company bought a reservations service! Others broker access with membership and pay-to-play models — we’re all still trying to get into Carbone — and it’s shockingly easy to build a personal AI agent that makes all your reservations for you. The business has grown up, and I think restaurants are better for it. Still… is it weird for a technology writer to be nostalgic for simpler times?

✌️, Tock, I’ll miss you.

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Some oldies but goodies:

Tock to Squarespace for $400 million

Tock's Takeout Win

Tock sells wine now

Tock’s leader talks competition

1. I don’t write the headlines.