There’s no perfect way around reservations scalping

New York’s lawmakers, with support from reservations companies, are trying, though!

Photo via Unsplash

Late last week, the New York State Legislature passed the so-called “Restaurant Reservations Anti-Piracy Act,” which fines third-parties who sell restaurant reservations without written permission from the restaurant. Rule-breakers can be fined up to $1,000 per restaurant listing per day, though it’s unclear how this would be enforced. The measure needs the governor’s signature before becoming law. 

The bill was introduced about a month after the New Yorker published an article highlighting the opaque world of nabbing a prime table, and how services built to score the bookings (and then resell them) can hurt some of the city’s most iconic restaurants. It explains how they’ve co-opted decades-long booking norms, boosted by new tech. Will a law targeting a small amount of resellers trafficking in an even smaller number of restaurants really stop this behavior? 

Restaurants see these services as nefarious actors. 

“What the actual f—?” David Nayfeld of San Francisco Italian spot Che Fico asked the San Francisco Chronicle after the paper flagged Che Fico’s listing on Appointment Trader a year-and-a-half ago. “Is it bots?” 

In the New Yorker, Eric Ripert from Le Bernardin says his team spends “hours trying to track down the bots and fake reservations” every day. 

Bots that crawl reservations sites, snapping up desirable tables the moment they’re released, are notoriously hard to combat. “We can use all the technology that we can dream up,” says Matt Tucker, CEO of reservations and ticketing platform Tock. “And we have great stuff… but you can’t always prevent it from happening.” 

That doesn’t mean they’re not trying. In fact, Tucker says, the latest bot troubles for restaurants prove Tock’s original concept works for restaurants — charging diners for the full cost of the meal at the time of booking. That makes it harder for the bots to handle, since the restaurant is sitting on the prospective diner’s credit card info. But the idea of paying ahead for a restaurant meal anywhere except for the most special of celebrations. 

The New York bill targets resellers — scalpers — but lawmakers and supporters, like the NYC Hospitality Alliance,  have tied the practice to no-shows. 

When the bots scoop up too many reservations and can’t sell them, those bookings turn to no-shows. It’s not surprising that existing reservations services have come out in favor of the legislation, positioning the bots and resellers as pulling a piece of the market away from legitimate providers. 

“The passage of this bill is a meaningful one for restaurants and will help protect their bottom lines by reducing the ‘no shows’ caused by fraudulent reservations. We are pleased to see New York take a strong stance to support its restaurants,” said OpenTable CEO Debby Soo in a statement last week. 

Major reservations services have been working to target the no-show problem for years. The generally accepted statistic is that as many as 1 in 5 reservations doesn’t bother to show up. Monetary deposits and credit card holds can help; OpenTable says that restaurants that don’t use credit card holds or deposits upon booking see twice as many no-shows as those that do. 

But even when those deposits work as intended to enforce legit, human-made bookings, they can feel inhospitable to diners on the hook for a canceled booking. 

Alas, deposits alone won’t curb the scalping.