No matter how wealthy you are, it can still be hard to snag restaurant reservations at the hottest spots in the world – until now.
With services that allow people to trade reservations at all kinds of top-rated eateries in cities from Osaka to Oslo – just as sites like StubHub allow sports fans to list their tickets to games – diners with existing reservations can list them on Appointment Trader and sell them to fellow gourmands.
“Everyone wants to get in somewhere they can’t and brag about it,” Nick DiMaggio, who’s used the company to acquire more than 220 reservations, told The New York Times. “The rich will pay anything for access.”
The selling of reservations distinguishes the site from other platforms like Resy, which doesn’t enable diners to sell their reservations. Though for years, diners have used Reddit to sell reservations or sites like Killer Rezzy – to the aggravation of restaurant owners, who say they prefer free sites like Open Table. One reservation-trading system that didn’t cost money was #FreeRezy, an online group that was taken advantage of by some users in the finance and tech worlds and was eventually shut down by Resy.
It’s part of a wave of online reservation-trading platforms that also includes hotels – Roomer and Spare Fare are travel marketplaces that allow people to list their nonrefundable hotel reservations for sale and offer them to buyers at a discounted price. More elite sites like Hoken, a marketplace for prepaid hotel reservations focused around in-demand events such as Art Basel and Sundance, recently raised $9 million to expand its operations.