Would you buy a reservation?
Mar 13, 2008 general food
Here’s a trend I’m hoping will never make it to the Midwest…
The New York times reported yesterday on a company called TableXchange that is a sort of eBay for restaurant reservations.
For $15-$40 you can buy a prime reservations in a number of top New York restaurants.
While I agree with restaurant owners saying it throws “a wrench into their carefully guarded reservation systems and lent to their culture of hospitality the odor of street corner ticket scalping,” reservations are notoriously difficult to obtain in New York and they probably should have seen this one coming.
The whole thing is painfully absurd to me and it’s pretty obvious TableXchange thinks this practice is a bit shifty as well as “the buyer and the seller of a TableXchange reservation are instructed not to change the name on the reservation and the buyer is told not to reveal to anyone at the restaurant how he or she got it.”
What I’m wondering is what happens when the same ticketing brokers that swoop up all the concert tickets to a big show begin calling restaurants strictly to obtain reservations in hopes of reselling them, and furthermore, will restaurants take matters into their own hands and start having diners bid on prime reservations directly?
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