The restaurant reservation wars show no signs of slowing down
By Jordan Valinsky, CNN
New York (CNN) — When Mona Panjwani opened One40 Rooftop, an upscale restaurant in lower Manhattan last year, one of her first big decisions was choosing the reservation platform.
She knew the right choice could help attract attention in a competitive dining scene during a tough economic environment.
“This is my first restaurant in the city, and I’m starting to build my own hospitality profile,” Panjwani told CNN, so she’s relying on these platforms for exposure.
Restaurant owners like Panjwani are caught in the middle of a growing battle of new and established reservation platforms vying for their business.
The two dominant players for more than a decade, OpenTable and Resy, are now facing a wave of fresh competition from high-end services and even delivery apps — all trying to win lucrative bookings at exclusive establishments.
That’s all the more critical as customers dial back eating out: Nearly 40% of Americans said they’re visiting restaurants less frequently to save money, according to a recent YouGov survey.
OpenTable vs. Resy
For more than a decade, the battle for online reservations was fought between OpenTable and Resy.
OpenTable, which launched in 1998, largely had a stranglehold on online reservations. Then Resy entered the scene in 2014, catering to high-end restaurants and drawing the attention of American Express, which acquired the company five years later.
OpenTable remains the biggest service with about 60,000 restaurants. Resy will soon grow to 25,000 establishments after announcing it would add Tock, a booking app focused on wineries and tasting menus, into its platform this summer.
Resy, while smaller, tends to have trendier and more upscale places on its platform, which is partly why Panjwani ultimately chose it for One40. There’s also its “very competitive” pricing, she said, since Resy charges just a monthly fee while OpenTable also charges a fee per diner.
But Panjwani liked Resy’s connection to American Express, which offers monthly dining credits to members of its higher-end cards.
That attracts the higher-end clientele that “we’re really looking for” at an upscale restaurant, she added.
Fresh competition
The success of Resy and OpenTable has sparked new entrants — like Dorsia, a platform named after the fictional restaurant where the main character yearns for a reservation in the 2000 movie “American Psycho.”
The membership-based service, founded four years ago, charges diners between $200 and $25,000 a year to access and secure tables at the world’s hottest restaurants, like Carbone in New York or Cote in Miami.
Unlike most of its other rivals, Dorsia members are required to pre-pay a minimum amount on each booking that could possibly soar into the thousands. The service aims to stop no-shows and ensure revenue for owners, a big appeal to restaurants.
“The (reservation) wars are definitely happening,” Dorsia founder Marc Lotenberg told CNN.
Dorsia has grown to 30,000 paying members and is generating $100,000 to $200,000 in daily revenue, he added.
That success is partly why food delivery apps are moving into the reservation space. Uber Eats soft-launched a program last year in partnership with OpenTable while DoorDash acquired booking platform SevenRooms for $1.2 billion nearly a year ago.
Those apps realize that reservations are the “missing piece of the dining ecosystem,” said Marco Shalma, founder and editor-in-chief of We Eat Here, a popular newsletter that focuses on New York City’s dining scene.
“Owning the reservation layer means owning the customer relationship. And that is extremely valuable,” he told CNN. “Whoever controls reservations can influence discovery, traffic and demand patterns across entire cities.”
DoorDash’s fledgling service, initially offered in New York, Miami and Las Vegas, expanded into Chicago earlier this month. It offers delivery credits to users who book through its app and lures fine diners with “exclusive” reservations, like at New York celebrity hotspot The Corner Store and its new starry spin-off The Eighty Six.
Lotenberg said that as competition heats up, the word “exclusive” is becoming “bastardized” since those hard-to-get tables often appear on different platforms.
Plus, he thinks there’s an even bigger challenge for delivery apps.
“People don’t want to book their restaurant reservation for The Eighty Six on the same platform that they’re booking McDonald’s delivery,” Lotenberg said.
Beyond the booking
Resy is trying to expand beyond reservations through a high-tech makeover that should provide owners more personalized data and give customers improved recommendations, said CEO Pablo Rivero.
“We’re evolving from being primarily a table management system to being a connected ecosystem,” he told CNN. In the coming months, more AI and other tech tools will be added to help customize the dining experience.
That’s welcome news for restaurant owners like Panjwani, who said that she could use better data and insights about her customers, like where else they’ve eaten or how they found her restaurant.
Ultimately, she wishes the reservation services would work together so she can use multiple platforms at once without overbooking her restaurants.
“If we could leverage a lot of different platforms, that would be great. But being a small business, we just stay focused on what we know — one of the well-known platforms,” she said.
Although better technology to find restaurants will help owners, it’s not necessarily a win for diners, especially at coveted restaurants in major cities.
We Eat Here’s Shalma said that some reservations are starting to mimic ticket-sale services that benefit only those who know how to game them.
“When every seat becomes digital inventory, the restaurant stops behaving like a neighborhood space and starts behaving like a scheduling system,” he said. “That, in my opinion, is the tension underlying all of this competition.”
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