Reservation apps, credit-card companies compete for exclusive access to restaurant tables

Uber Eats, DoorDash push deeper into reservation software

In cities across the country, reservations at high-end restaurants are becoming harder to secure, with diners logging on at midnight weeks in advance and finding only odd time slots — or nothing at all. The scarcity reflects a wave of dealmaking among reservation apps and credit-card companies, along with a growing industry of middlemen, all competing for access to the customers who spend the most.

That group accounts for roughly a quarter of the nearly $1.5 trillion Americans spend eating out, according to federal data. Reservation apps are signing up restaurants to lock in tables exclusively for their top users, membership clubs are charging diners to cut the line, and credit-card companies are paying restaurants for blocks of early seats to offer as cardholder perks.

Delivery platforms have joined the market. Uber Eats has partnered with OpenTable, and DoorDash bought SevenRooms, a reservation-management system geared toward higher-end restaurants, for $1.2 billion last year. Restaurant owners say they have been offered five- to seven-figure sums to switch to SevenRooms since the acquisition.

The offers extend to smaller operators. Scott Weiner, head of Fifth/50 Group, a Chicago network of restaurants and cocktail bars that includes Kindling and the Berkshire Room, said he has received offers totaling tens of thousands of dollars from the major reservation apps. He passed on one exclusive partnership pitched at roughly $15,000 in cash plus an event to showcase his restaurants. “Ten thousand doesn’t really do anything to me,” Weiner said.

Pablo Rivero, CEO of Resy, which American Express purchased in 2019, said of the industry’s financial turn: “My personal view is that money invested in restaurants is a good thing. Full stop.” Rivero said the app-on-app competition applies to only a small percentage of restaurants and likened the fervor over exclusive access to the long lines that form for popular doughnuts or bubble tea. OpenTable, which has partnerships with Visa and Chase, said less than 1% of the 70,000 restaurants on its platform are paid to hold tables for its dining-access programs.

Some restaurateurs juggle multiple platforms to meet diners where they are. John Winterman, co-owner of Francie, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, said he embraces as many of the apps as his diners do. “We’re married to Resy, but we have OpenTable, SevenRooms and also Yelp as our mistresses,” he said with some audible fatigue. “I just want to take advantage and meet the customer where they are,” he added.

The dynamic has reshaped a decades-old business. Restaurant bookkeeping moved online in 1998, when San Francisco-based entrepreneur Chuck Templeton started OpenTable, which let diners secure a reservation over the internet. The pitch to restaurants “was getting more butts on seats,” Templeton said, along with better customer tracking, at roughly $1 per diner seated plus software fees. OpenTable served more than 30,000 restaurants by the time travel company Priceline bought it in 2014 at a valuation of $2.6 billion.

Acquisitions and credit-card partnerships followed. American Express bought Resy in 2019 to court younger spenders. In 2024, OpenTable struck a deal with Visa to give cardholders exclusive access to coveted tables, and it partnered with Chase last year to offer benefits to Sapphire Reserve cardholders who pay $795 annually. “We got into this game that we didn’t invent but was necessary to play,” said Debby Soo, OpenTable’s CEO.

For most restaurants, working with the apps is a matter of survival. Full-service restaurants reported a median income before taxes of 2.8% of sales last year, with expenses up 36% from before the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association trade group. Ben Leventhal, a co-founder of Resy who now runs the loyalty app Blackbird, said restaurant top-line sales have grown massively over 25 years but added: “The numbers around profitability in restaurants that have come out from 2025 are staggering. Almost half of all restaurants are not profitable.”

The technology stack has become its own administrative burden. Chris DeSaye, vice president of information technology for Gibsons Restaurant Group, which has around 700 tables across 14 restaurants, said his company needs roughly 85 pieces of technology to power reservations, customer relations and online ordering. “You need 85 pieces of technology and a guy like me,” DeSaye said. “It’s one of the requirements of the business.”

The layered systems have left consumers confused about how and where to book, and a crop of middlemen now capitalizes on the bewilderment. Tarek Arafat and co-founder Frank Besson created TableOne, an app that scrapes online reservations the moment they are released and makes them accessible to members; roughly 10,000 subscribers pay $129 a year for the service in eight cities. Other sites, including Apartment Trader, auction off reservations, with bidding reaching hundreds or thousands of dollars. Roughly half a dozen states, including Illinois and New York, have passed bans on reservation reselling.

Liz Luciano, an executive assistant to New York City financial and real-estate firms, said she frequently must secure reservations at in-demand restaurants like The Corner Store or The Polo Bar for her bosses, who spend thousands of dollars on client dinners. When she tried to join Dorsia, a members-only platform named for the impossible-to-book restaurant in Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” she said she was told the app was full, and another time that it was highly selective. “We have to become the miracle workers,” Luciano said, adding that in her view the restaurants “have moved so far away from the clients.”

To keep its most loyal patrons from becoming alienated, Francie is among the restaurants now offering house accounts or memberships that give guests a way to make reservations directly, even at the last minute. “I’m a little bit of the old school of cultivating regulars and getting people to want to come back to you,” Winterman said.

Mike Anthony, the executive chef at Gramercy Tavern in New York City, suggested an old-school remedy for frustrated diners: pick up the phone and call. “What most people don’t fully understand is that we have a 10 to 15% cancellation and no-show rate in every restaurant in New York City,” he said. “Restaurants are very eager and yearning to get those tables filled.”