“We’re selling dinner; we don’t sell the opportunity to have dinner,” Mr. Bastianich said. “It goes against the grain of everything we do.”
Restaurateurs in the city say they are flummoxed and incensed by a growing marketplace for online reservations. It has been about two years since another service, PrimeTime Tables, began selling access to the most sought reservations in
Restaurant owners fumed then, saying PrimeTime Tables threw a wrench into their carefully guarded reservation systems and lent to their culture of hospitality the odor of street corner ticket scalping…
… 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. So Mr. Bastianich would have had no way of knowing whether the person who confirmed the reservation had sold it to somebody else.”
It is disconcerting to imagine that brokers are the ones making reservations to your restaurant every day and then reselling that reservation to their clients. What other aspects of your restaurant's operation can be repackaged by an enterprising broker?
