The Mail on Sunday

Table for 2? That’ll be £400 thanks to touts muscling in on restaurant­s

- By Daisy Graham-Brown

TICKET touts have long been a depressing feature of rock concerts and football matches... now they’re using robot technology to beat you to a table at London’s top restaurant­s.

The touts buy up reservatio­ns then sell them on to desperate diners for eye-watering fees.

Thanks to the now widespread use of online booking platforms, fine dining spots across the capital are being block-booked by so-called ‘scalpers’. A website called Appointmen­t Trader allows customers to bid on the bookings, where last night £403 would have secured a table for two at Notting Hill’s Core by Clare Smyth on May 17, while a slot at Mayfair’s Novikov would have cost £220.

A reservatio­n for two last night at the River Cafe was on offer for £284, and £256 would bag a May booking at Gymkhana in Mayfair.

These staggering sums only pay for the booking and often cost more than the bill itself.

The lucrative business is made possible with simple software that uses bots to scour thousands of restaurant­s online and book vacancies on websites such as OpenTable, Resy and Tock.

Touts are booking as many tables as possible using fake names, email addresses and phone numbers so that they can trade the bookings for small fortunes on Appointmen­t Trader.

Restaurant­s will often be completely unaware that their customers are securing tables in this manner and are powerless to stop it without resorting to telephone-only bookings, which is likely to cost them sales.

James Chiavarini, who runs Il Portico in Kensington, told

The Times he found the practice ‘a little bit depressing’ as ‘restaurant­s are fundamenta­lly a human-driven business’.

 ?? ?? FINE DINING: Clare Smyth of Core
FINE DINING: Clare Smyth of Core

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