“If you want to have dinner at 8, then you should have dinner at 8“
New restaurant booking app Resy is soon to launch (in the US first) and plans to allow users to pay for prime time tables if they haven’t booked in advance. We’ve seen this kind of model before: taxi app Uber doubles, triples or even quadruples prices during storms and competitor InGoGo allows you to offer drivers a “bonus” of $5, $10, $15 or more to take the booking.
We can imagine there’ll be some demand in cities like London and New York where there are larger populations, more competition for certain tables and, perhaps, larger numbers of the type of people who would pay to queue jump. But will this catch on in Australia? From a restaurant’s point of view, someone willing to pay $100 to get a table is a profitable customer and unlikely to miss their booking: $100 in the bank before they’ve even ordered food and drink is attractive in these highly competitive times.… Read more