Website promises the hot reservation
If you’re yearning to try Carbone’s spicy rigatoni vodka or the Polo Bar’s bacon cheeseburger, it could take you months — and some luck — to get a reservation. But a website called Appointment Trader may be able to get you a table tonight, if you’re willing to pay several hundred dollars.
The site, which started in 2021, lets people with existing reservations sell them on a virtual marketplace. And it gives diners the chance to snag a table at a very exclusive restaurant, like Rao’s, where reservations have become harder to get than Taylor Swift tickets.
Although the platform trades reservations in hundreds of cities, Appointment Trader’s founder Jonas Frey said it is beginning to reach a significant customer base in New York City, where the site gets half of its traffic. In the process, it has become a growing concern for some traditional reservation platforms.
The idea for the site was born from the frustration of trying to make a high- demand reservation, said Frey, who lives in Miami. He started the platform as a way for people to buy hard- to- get appointments at motor- vehicle departments, but quickly expanded it to include restaurants, hotel rooms, bars and clubs.
Frey, 35, created an algorithm that uses cellphone data he bought from vendors to identify the most popular restaurants and when they’ll be packed to set the price of each initial bid. Millions of dollars in reservations have been sold, according to the site.
Appointment Trader takes a cut of about 20% to 30% from the reservation’s sale price, depending on the type of reservation.
Of course, the original reservation costs nothing, except in cases where the diner has to pay a deposit. “There is a lot of demand for something that’s free,” Frey said.
Appointment Trader even allows users to bid on reservations that don’t exist yet. Those reservation slots can be created by restaurant managers, who often have the power to find room for powerful customers. Managers can then pocket the bid, Frey said.
AJ Bernstein of Las Vegas, who works at a tech company, has used the site for five reservations, at places including Sexy Fish in Miami, Delilah in Las Vegas, and Beauty & Essex and Mizumi in New York City. He said he was willing to spend hundreds of dollars to secure a reservation because “it’s really a drop in the bucket compared to the total amount” spent at dinner.
“These are restaurants that have exclusivity, and that makes it more desirable,” he said. “I’m paying more of a premium because I want to be at this specific restaurant.”
Bernstein, 48, said he views these restaurants as must- visit attractions, like the Statue of Liberty. The most he has paid was $ 200 to eat at Sexy Fish, where he said he spent $ 3,000 for four people. He has since gone three other times to the restaurant’s locations in South Florida and London.
In New York City, Nick Dimaggio, 33, has used Appointment Trader to book more than 220 reservations for restaurants such as Carbone, Nobu Malibu and the Polo Bar, for himself and for clients of his concierge business, called Little Nicky.