Last September, members of the restaurant industry converged on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for the Welcome Conference, a see-and-be-seen day of networking and inspirational speaking that has become over the past decade something like a Davos for the hospitality set. That year, as in previous ones, the event was sponsored by the American Express–owned reservations platform Resy. Resy also splashed out on an invite-only after-party at Coqodaq, the hot destination for Korean fried chicken and Champagne.
As the conference drew to a close on Monday evening, chartered buses idled on Broadway outside Avery Fisher Hall’s glass lobby. “I heard people saying the buses outside were going to the after-party,” one veteran publicist who was in attendance recalls. “So I got on.” Soon, she came to realize that she wasn’t headed to Coqodaq. The bus was going to a different party, one hosted by Resy’s top rival, OpenTable.
OpenTable didn’t sponsor the influential conference; the company figured out a different way of staying in the conversation: siphon off some of the crowd to a circus-themed extravaganza at the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea.
In one sense, the online-reservation tables had been turned. A decade ago, Resy skimmed many of the most popular restaurants off of OpenTable’s platform, turning it from a monopoly player in digital reservations to an old-timer. Over the last year or so, that’s changed: OpenTable is now betting that a combination of product updates, pricing changes, and a full-on charm offensive — plus, in certain cases, straight cash — will be enough to win back the kinds of sought-after spots that draw diners to a booking platform.
The strategy is working. Estela, Raf’s, Altro Paradiso, Scarr’s Pizza, and Win Son are just some of the restaurants that have moved from Resy to OpenTable since last summer. Meanwhile, newer spots like Demo, Strange Delight, Bar Kabawa, Gjelina, and Zimmi’s — hip places one might automatically assume are on Resy — launched on OpenTable right out of the gate. Don Angie and San Sabino are in the process of making the switch, too. “More and more you’re seeing OpenTable picking off restaurants,” one Brooklyn chef told me. “I know several in the process of changing over. I’ve seen higher-profile restaurants switching. I think the tipping point isn’t that huge, or that far away.”
OpenTable was founded in 1998, and for restaurants wanting anything more than a pen-and-ink system, it was for years the only real option. But restaurateurs used the service only begrudgingly. OpenTable charged $1 for every diner that booked through its website, pricing which most found exorbitant. In the 2010s, when I was working in the restaurant industry, OpenTable’s customer service was lackluster, and the functionality stubbornly basic. This was the smartphone era, and OpenTable wasn’t even web-based; the company literally lugged a computer and server into each restaurant it served, and if anyone wanted to view or update the reservation book, they could do so only from that single terminal.
Resy arrived in 2014. The upstart tech company spotted OpenTable’s weaknesses and built a product that addressed many of them. “Restaurants evolved past where the software had,” Resy co-founder Ben Leventhal told me during a conversation last summer. “The demand for popular restaurants was starting to really spike, and they had no tools to capitalize on that.” Resy went after the hottest newcomers, charged them a modest software fee, and gave them in return a modern, easy-to-use tool for managing reservation demand. Resy also offered cachet: “It became very important in downtown New York that you were on Resy,” explains Jennifer Vitagliano, the co-owner of Elizabeth Street Hospitality, which runs Musket Room, Raf’s, and Cafe Zaffri. “That’s where diners would intuitively go to look.”
A 2019 acquisition by American Express cemented Resy’s lead with the most sought-after restaurants. The credit card company bought the platform in order to offer its members preferential access to those restaurants, and had the cash to reward operators for holding back tables for Amex cardholders. For the biggest-name restaurants and chefs, even more money was doled out in the form of event sponsorships.
OpenTable — which has been owned by travel-technology conglomerate Booking Holdings since 2014 — never came close to surrendering the top spot in terms of overall market share. OpenTable’s platform is used in over 60,000 restaurants, compared with the 20,000 that book on Resy. But it still found itself in a perilous state when Debby Soo, a former senior executive from a Booking Holdings sister brand, Kayak, took over as CEO in 2020. Soo found that, despite the rise of new competitors like Resy and Tock, little had changed at OpenTable in a decade. “In terms of feature set, there wasn’t that much new or different,” Soo says. “We were still the biggest, but were we the best? I did not think we were.”
Soo got to work upgrading features, like making it possible for restaurant groups to share information across all of their properties and adding OpenTable’s own version of Resy’s popular “Notify” feature. The platform has also created a new “Icons” category, which helped higher profile spots stand out. Soo also changed OpenTable’s pricing from its legacy per-diner fee structure to a more flexible suite of options that put it in line with competitors. Finally, she bulked up the business’s sales and customer-service teams, which continue to grow each year.
OpenTable’s upgrades came at a time when some customers had begun to grow frustrated with Resy. “Resy’s product has gotten so unbelievably bad since Amex acquired it,” one owner of a prominent restaurant group — and current Resy customer — tells me. “There’s been no innovation, and it’s getting glitchier and glitchier.”
I heard the same from a seasoned restaurant IT executive with experience using both platforms. “There’s a pretty clear line in the sand with the Amex acquisition where it feels like features and functionality developments came to a halt,” he says. These days, OpenTable is the more nimble product: “OpenTable has a product roadmap. They’re investing in developing the software.”
Soothr, a Thai spot in East Village, moved from OpenTable to Resy back in 2021. Joel Chidensee, the restaurant’s co-owner, says he made the switch because he saw the latter as “hot and popular.” Chidensee liked the platform initially, but within the past year or so, he started noticing more and more problems. The software would glitch — say, enter the same reservation in his system twice — and it wasn’t easy to reach someone at Resy to fix it. Reservation bots also became a growing concern, pushing up the restaurant’s no-show numbers, an ongoing problem that other operators say Resy has been unable to effectively combat.
Pablo Rivero, the CEO of Resy and SVP of American Express Global Dining, disputes the argument that his platform’s technology has stagnated. He says that in the past two years Resy has doubled the size of its engineering team, and Resy has released updates and new features like a discover tab, sharable hit lists, and analytics for restaurants to get more insights about their operations. Plus, American Express’ recent acquisitions of Tock and the payments platform Rooam will add more functionality. Rivero says Resy has a team dedicated to reservation fraud and continues to put a lot of resources behind it. “We’re focused on having the best platform, and on giving restaurants the best tools and flexibility,” Rivero says. “We believe investments we’re making are the right ones to support partners that we have.”
Resy’s new tools were not enough to appease Chidensee, however. He saw that OpenTable had added features that seemed like they would help Soothr market new menu items and special events, and more easily manage the flow of guests at the restaurant. Chidensee returned to OpenTable last fall, and was delighted to soon be included in a Visa-sponsored marketing event — the sort of opportunity which had never been offered to him at Resy. “They only focus on their favorite children,” Chidensee says.
The perception that Resy disproportionately focuses its attention and resources on a small, elite cadre of restaurants was something of a theme in the conversations I had with the owners of over a dozen restaurants that now list on OpenTable (Carbone, Tatiana, and Lilia were all mentioned repeatedly). “We weren’t the people they were bringing out to the Hamptons or to Art Basel,” says Elizabeth Street Hospitality’s Vitagliano.
“Resy, they approach it with a ‘you should be so lucky to work with us’ attitude,” says the chef Angie Mar, who used Resy’s platform at the now-closed Beatrice Inn. Mar opened her new restaurant, Le B., on OpenTable, and says the company maintains an ethos of hospitality and customer service that’s similar to how she runs her restaurants. “That’s completely missing from Resy,” she says. “It’s very corporate.”
White-glove customer service is important, but it only goes so far. Soo tells me that once she had overhauled OpenTable’s product and pricing, she also needed to match American Express’s spending power. “It wasn’t a level playing field,” Soo says. “You had Amex paying restaurants for holding back tables at primetime.” Soo had to run her business profitably, which didn’t allow for large cash kickbacks to her customers. “We realized we needed to find a credit-card partnership.”
Last July, OpenTable announced just such a deal with Visa. The relationship has given OpenTable a war chest to spend on wooing desirable restaurants onto its platform, who in return set aside some table inventory for Visa Infinite cardholders, just as Global Dining Access restaurants do for American Express.
Nobody wants to talk about how much money they’re getting from reservation companies — it breeds ill will with industry friends and colleagues, and Visa and Amex discourage it — but I’ve been told that the deals being floated by Visa are taking the pay-to-play game to extremes. One rumor circulating last fall was that Visa offered Simon Kim $1 million to move Coqadaq and his Cote Steakhouses to OpenTable (Kim declined to comment, but in any event, it doesn’t appear to have worked), and paid out almost as much to Don Angie and San Sabino in return for their own upcoming switch. Mattos Hospitality and Elizabeth Street Hospitality are two other rumored recipients of six-figure deals.
A strong sales team and big sponsorship money have helped OpenTable narrow the gap when it comes to where the most in-demand restaurants list their tables, but they haven’t yet closed it. If New York diners continue to view Resy as the top destination for the places they like to eat, restaurants choosing OpenTable will have to grapple with the question of whether their audience will find them on any other platform.
“I’ve had a meeting with OpenTable every year for four years, and it’s been feature conversations, dollar conversations, but it hadn’t been worth it because critical mass was so consolidated on Resy, it would be detrimental to business to switch,” says one restaurant-world power player. “This is the first year we’d consider doing it. The product is there, the critical mass is getting there. It’s going to be interesting.”