To eat in the best restaurants, you not only have to have the money to pay for the menu, you also need to have enough foresight to book months in advance not always on the day you would like the most.
But how much would certain people be willing to pay to be able to reserve at a restaurant? One day to another?
“The rich are going to pay whatever,” he says emphatically in The New York Times Nick DiMaggioan achiever who is, in turn, one of the biggest clients of Appointment Trader, the first service of reselling restaurant reservations already operating in the United States. “Everyone wants to get into a place where they can’t and brag about it.”
Although at first glance Appointment Trader looks a lot like controversial concert ticket touting sites like Viagogo, its operation is not exactly the same. The service, which has been operating since 2021, does not make reservations for resale, but instead allows people who already have a reservation at certain restaurants trade with them.
From DGT appointments to restaurant reservations
The web and app, an invention of the computer Jonas Freybegan as a platform where you could buy and sell the previous appointments of the equivalent to the American DGT, the Department of Motor Vehiclesbut soon the business spread to hotels, bars, clubs and restaurants.
To date, Appointment Trader has generated $2.4 million in his reservations: he takes 20 or 30% of the transactions between individuals, who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars just to have a table in the trendy restaurant. And it is that, unlike what happens with concert tickets, reservations do not include the price of the service themselves and are always free – there are restaurants that ask for deposits, but they are discounted from the final ticket. “There is a lot of demand for something that is free,” acknowledges Frey in the Times.
Although the platform works throughout the country, it is in New York where it has been most successful: the US economic capital accumulates half of the business. And it is that Appointment Trader can be reserved from one day to the next in the most fashionable places in the city such as Rao’s, Don Angie or Carbone (in the opening photo). A table for two in this last restaurant, the favorite of celebrities like Victoria Beckham, Rihanna or Kendall Jenner, is available for tomorrow at a price of 200 dollars. If you want one for Saturday the rate goes up to $350.
New York 9 (Lonely Planet City Guides)
Although, a priori, a platform like this is detrimental to the restaurants, the truth is that to a large extent they are also involved in garlic. Appointment Trader allows users to bid on reservations that do not yet exist. It is then the restaurants, where space is often always reserved for the wealthiest customers, that ‘generate’ that table and they take the money of the reserve.
In the United States, as in Spain, resale is prohibited. And indeed, New York resale law is particularly strict. But, for the moment, Appointment Trader is dodging legal problems, precisely because he is selling something that, a priori, is free.
Images | Major Food Group
In DAP | Where to eat in New York
In DAP | “Sorry, I forgot.” Reserve for 11 in a restaurant in Galicia, does not appear and the excuse does not convince anyone