Black-Market Restaurant Reservations Impact Operators

A growing black market for hard-to-get restaurant reservations is causing issues for operators, the National Restaurant Association says.

The association explains that individuals and companies are using technology to grab reservations from legitimate restaurant websites or restaurant-approved reservation sites and then selling them on unauthorized online resale sites and social media.

It says the process is causing challenges for operators like costly no-shows, staffing needs to manage expectations of customers who purchase the third-party reservations, and potential damage to the restaurant’s brand and reputation.

“The more technology helps us find efficiency in our daily lives, the more it also creates new ways for people to game the system,” says Mike Whatley, vice president of state affairs and grassroots advocacy for the association, in a press release. “We saw something similar in the early days of third-party delivery, when some companies were putting restaurants on their platforms without contracts or permission from the restaurant.”

Whatley says many states took steps to regulate the relationship between operators and delivery companies to give control back to the restaurants, and the association would like that same kind of relationship between the reservation sites and operators in this situation. In 2024, New York was the first to regulate the relationship, passing the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act. California, Florida, Illinois, Hawaii, Louisiana and Nevada have introduced similar legislation this year.