Restaurateurs Frustrated by Automated Booking Systems

In order to secure a reservation at Don Angie, the popular Italian-American restaurant located in New York’s West Village, customers are advised to visit the Resy website at 9 a.m. exactly seven days prior to their desired dining date. This is the protocol established by chef-owners Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli for prospective guests.

But those who have recently tried to book these elusive spots through the booking platform know that they rarely open up.

However, if you head over to Appointment Trader and are willing to pay up to $125 just to walk in the door, you can start bidding on any date over the next few weeks.

The problem of places disappearing that should be available started last summer, says Rito. “But it has become more apparent in recent months.”

He believes that bots — software designed to perform specific tasks, such as swiping up Taylor Swift tickets or restaurant reservations in milliseconds when seats open up — are mostly to blame.

The operators behind those seat grab programs then try to make a quick buck – or several hundred – by reselling the bookings to sites like Appointment Trader. The two-year-old website allows individuals to buy and sell restaurant reservations and find seats with bots, concierges and other people with access to restaurants.

Owners of several hard-to-reach New York restaurants, from downtown Indian haunts Dhamaka and Semma, to the tiny Tribeca Farra Wine Bar and the revamped New American Virginia’s, also report being burned by bots. “We’ve noticed that certain names get a lot of bookings and either don’t show up or are used by guests,” says Isabella Pisacane, partner and director of hospitality at French bistro Libertine. “Certain guests seem intimidated when approaching the maitre’d at check-in because they don’t use their real names.”

“It’s a very serious problem now that’s happening to a lot of restaurants and bars,” says GN Chan, co-owner of Double Chicken Please on the Lower East Side, ranked No. 2 on the World’s 50 Best Bars list. He notes that the bar started getting referrals from bots shortly after the drinking den was named the best bar in North America earlier this year.

Em Pak, director of Double Chicken Please, says there are some signature ways to tell if a bot has booked: Resy accounts can be linked to invalid email addresses made up of jumbled numbers and letters, or profiles with histories. at the best time of booking, back-to-back bookings on weekends – like 7pm. bookings every Friday and Saturday for multiple weekends. Others are the usual disconnected phone numbers and invalid credit cards attached to reservations.

But while they may suspect suspicious activity ahead of time, Pak admits they often don’t know for sure, “and we don’t want to risk canceling a reservation that belongs to someone who made a reservation.”

This means that not only does the business lose the $20 cancellation fee charged to invalid credit cards, but the bar loses time and ultimately customers and revenue when they have bots that fail to fill.

But Chan — who has seen seats at his bar sell for $340 apiece on the six-month-old Cita marketplace, another website that lets diners buy and sell restaurant reservations — talks about another problem. When guests drop $100 or more just to walk in the door, “people have [wrong] expectations when they come in,” he says, because expectations may be unreasonably high.

Pak says that Resy, which handles bookings for Double Chicken Please and is owned by American Express, has taken action: They’re “removing verified bot profiles and sending broker profiles essentially cease and desist emails,” he says. The measures have helped, Pak adds, but the problem persists. Now Double Chicken Please has reduced the number of reserved seats it offers and welcomes more walk-ins.

A Resy spokesperson says the company is taking steps to prevent bot bookings. “Resy detects and disables bad operator accounts, cancels bookings and blocks bot traffic,” they said in an email.

Tock, another reservation site that reserves tables at high-profile restaurants around the world, has an in-house anti-fraud team that uses its own algorithm to flag suspicious activity. It has used it to block cards and scalper accounts a few times. Two months ago, the company added verification techniques to block bots, including user checkboxes to ensure they are real people. Resy also uses a variety of checks, including check boxes and two-factor authentication for profiles.

Some new sites are testing their own bot circumvention methods. ResX, a six-month-old app that originated from an Instagram account, is free to use and offers diners a platform to donate and redeem restaurant reservations. For $10 a month, ResX also offers access to so-called “premium” restaurants, such as powerhouse pasta joint Misi in Brooklyn. Users earn “tokens” by surrendering their bookings; tokens, in turn, can be used to redeem premium bookings.

Longtime ResX user Jake Andrew, who declined to give his last name, has been using the app to avoid cancellation fees. That includes a table swap for 8 at Montauk’s Surf Lodge last summer—the definition of prime culinary real estate in the Hamptons. “I was billed $400, $50 per guest,” he says.

Another new members-only app, Dorsia, partners with restaurants to make the best reservations at places like supper club space 9 Jones and even the impossible-to-get-to Carbone in New York. (The site, whose name has a clear American Psycho connection, also covers cities like Miami, London, the Bay Area and Los Angeles restaurants.)

However, the diner must agree to a certain pre-paid personal spend when he makes the reservation: For example, dinner at Cote Korean Steakhouse may cost $125 per person on a weekday at 5pm to 9pm on the weekend, this figure may be $175. The advantage is that while the seats may cost more, the extra money goes into the diner’s food and drinks instead of the retailer’s pocket.

So far, the only solution for frustrated restaurateurs is “a lot of extra time and effort,” says Don Angie’s Rito. He and his staff currently reach out to each customer on Don Angie’s waiting list one-by-one to ensure they are the real person walking through the restaurant’s door and being seated.