It can be tough nabbing a reservation at Monteverde Restaurant & Pastificio in Chicago. Often listed among not-to-be-missed dining spots in the city, the 10-year-old restaurant releases most reservations 30 days in advance. They are posted at midnight on Resy.
And often by 12:02 a.m., those seats are entirely booked.
Rob Mosher, the restaurant’s co-owner, said it’s clear reservation piracy is at play.
“I just can’t fathom, looking around our dining room every night, that everybody in that dining room has stayed up until midnight to book a reservation, as though it were a Taylor Swift concert,” he said. “It’s just not something I believe happens.”
Monteverde, and now many in-demand restaurants in major cities, say they have fallen victim to the black market of restaurant reservations. And they have had enough.
Monteverde holds back some seating for regulars and walk-ins. Providing that access is an aspect of hospitality, officials say. | Photo courtesy of Galdones Photography.
Typically, reservation pirates use bots or software designed to quickly nab reservations as soon as they appear on OpenTable, Resy or restaurant websites. Then those seats are offered for sale on third-party platforms, like Appointment Trader and others.
The restaurants are not compensated in any way. And many operators may not even be aware their otherwise free reservations are being sold. A recent Friday night reservation for two at Monteverde, for example, was listed on Appointment Trader for $60.
A New Yorker article last year pulled back the curtain on the practice, quoting entrepreneurial resellers who boasted earning thousands in relatively passive income as a side hustle, selling seats at Polo Bar or Yoshino in New York. Some said they have an elite client list of celebrities who take advantage of their services.
And last year, New York became the first state to crack down on the practice with the passage of the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act. The bill doesn’t ban the practice of reselling reservations, but it requires third-party marketplaces to enter into a written agreement with restaurant operators before listing reservations for sale—or face fines and potential legal action.
And the effort to crack down on the black market is spreading.
Similar legislation has been proposed in California, Illinois, Florida, Louisiana, Hawaii and Nevada this year.
And more restaurant operators are speaking out to regain control of what they say is a fundamental aspect of their hospitality.
“What we’re really looking for is equity, fairness and a level playing field,” said Mosher. “So that anybody who reaches out to make a reservation has the same ability to do so as everybody else.”
Pay to play
For certain consumers, the black market for reservations can seem appealing as a way to snag a table at a hot restaurant—at least, for those who can afford to tack on hundreds, or even thousands, to the cost of dining out.
A survey by the National Restaurant Association released in April found that 15% of diners said they had been charged for a reservation.
But more than two-thirds believe that unauthorized selling of reservations was harmful. Respondents (72%) were concerned that the resale put certain restaurants out of reach to even more customers. And 70% said they were concerned about financial harm to restaurants.
Many restaurant operators may not even know their tables are being scooped up by bots, said Steve Woodruff, operations manager at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, another much-in-demand dining spot targeted by reservation pirates.
Woodruff said he learned of it about 18 months ago, when a customer expressed gratitude for getting a reservation, saying how crazy it is to have to pay so much extra through the resale sites.
Woodruff was baffled. Commander’s Palace, of course, does not charge for reservations. The restaurant does not even ask for a cancellation fee, he said.
Every month on the first of the month, the restaurant makes reservations available for an entire month two months ahead on both Tock and the restaurant’s website. On May 1, for example, all of July opened for reservations.
Commander's Palace is popular with both locals and tourists. | Photo courtesy of Commander's Palace.
Now, however, Woodruff said it’s pretty clear there is software snapping up reservations. Typically, Commander’s Palace only releases a certain number of reservations online, he explained. Others are available for guests who call the restaurant’s reservationist. It’s a service many longtime locals prefer, he said, and an extension of the restaurant’s hospitality.
But when online reservations are taken, Woodruff sometimes moves some of the seats held for call-ins to Tock or the website.
“Then, as soon as I do that—before I have even left the screen—they book,” he said. “I’ve seen it happen too many times. It’s pretty unlikely a human just happened to log on just as I released them.”
On the Friday before Mother’s Day, for example, Appointment Trader users looking for seats at Commander’s Palace were invited to start bidding at $50.
For Woodruff, it’s just not fair to customers. At least ticket scalpers actually pay for the original ticket, he notes.
Woodruff also believes the practice has contributed to no shows for the restaurant. Because there is no cancellation fee, if the reservation is not sold, it just goes unused—leaving Woodruff with a last-minute scramble to fill the seat.
Woodruff is optimistic the bill in Louisiana—which is modeled after that of New York—will at least give the restaurant more control by requiring third-party sellers to enter into a contract to sell bookings.
Would Commander’s Palace consider signing on with a site like Appointment Trader?
“I doubt it,” said Woodruff. “We’re really geared toward what’s best for the customer.”
Communism versus capitalism
Jonas Frey, the founder of Appointment Trader, said the site has offered restaurants an opportunity to partner since 2022, a year after he created the platform. But there hasn’t been much interest.
The feedback was that the website was “too ugly” and “too transactional,” he said. Now that it’s getting so much national press, however, restaurant operators are more willing to take a look. He recently launched a new AI-powered version.
Appointment Trader isn’t the only third-party platform for the sale of reservations, but it’s the most known. Frey said the platform earned revenues of $7 million in 2024 by taking a cut of transactions.
The top seller on Appointment Trader made $365,000 last year, and not by selling hundreds of bookings, Frey said. That seller had access to reservations through “relationships” with the restaurants and sold seats using a bidding system, he said. Buyers, for example, might use the site to offer a “reward” to get into a certain restaurant on a certain day.
Let’s say you’re in Las Vegas and you want to go to the restaurant Delilah at the Wynn, he explained. A buyer might go on the site to offer $200 to find a table for six. Then someone in Las Vegas might tip the GM to get a booking to create that inventory, he said.
Most bookings are the day of or next day, he said, and most transactions are $80 to $100. Sure, someone paid more than $2,000 to snag a four-top at Antoine’s on Super Bowl weekend. “But that’s one guy out of hundreds of transactions,” he said.
Frey agrees that bot scraping—or “botting”— is not fair. He says his site has also been victim to the practice, with bots stealing Appointment Trader listings. The new-and-improved site has built in protections and policies to discourage such users.
Still, Frey makes the argument that his platform does, actually, help people who want to try the hottest restaurants. Just try visiting New York and getting a seat at a popular restaurant like Tatiana, 4 Charles Prime Rib or the Polo Club, he said. “You will not get that reservation for free.”
Frey, who said he grew up in East Germany, likens it as “communism versus capitalism.”
In East Germany, everyone was promised a car, for example. “But you had to wait 20 years for it,” he said. “The only way to do it fairly is to assign a price.”
A loophole
Meanwhile, Appointment Trader is no longer listing restaurants in New York, since the legislation was implemented there in February.
Frey, who has opposed the anti-piracy bills elsewhere, notes that the legislation as written still allows for certain loopholes. Some third-party reservation resale sites, like Dorsia, for example, operate as a membership club. Users pay for a subscription, which gives them access to coveted reservations.
Technically, the reservations are not being listed, bought or sold, which is what the anti-piracy bill targets. The legislation, however, doesn’t say anything about subscription fees, Frey said. “That’s not illegal.”
At press time, it wasn’t clear which state would be next to adopt anti-piracy legislation, but Mike Whatley, vice president of state affairs and grassroots advocacy for the National Restaurant Association, said the bills in all of the states have seen strong bipartisan support.
Last year, the Independent Restaurant Coalition worked with Congress on a similar bill at the federal level, though it seems more likely that state lawmakers will be taking action sooner.
Whatley likened the reservation black market to the period after the pandemic, when third-party delivery sites were listing restaurants on their platforms without permission, creating chaos for both restaurant operators and consumers.
That problem, however, was solved when around 20 states took steps to regulate the relationship by requiring some sort of consent from the restaurants.
“This is not outright banning this. This is giving restaurants control over their own reservations,” he said.