It is becoming difficult to get restaurant reservations because of scalpers.

Resale can be fun, like finding great finds at thrift stores. However, reselling can be a hassle, like when you pay thousands of dollars to see Taylor Swift.

One resale market that I haven't encountered (yet) is restaurant table reservations. But that may be about to change.

Adam Iscoe wrote about booking scalpers and brokers in The New Yorker. He joined Marketplace's Kristin Schwab to talk about what it takes to secure a seat at New York City's trendiest places. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Kristin Schwab: This is purely anecdotal, but I feel like it's getting harder and harder to get reservations these days, whether it's a fancy restaurant or a busy burger joint. What has changed in the way you actually get the table?

Adam Iscoe: Well, I mean, I think reservations have always been difficult in New York and other places. They have always held a kind of cultural currency. You know, the Four Seasons in the '60s, Le Cirque in the '80s, and Per Se in the 2000s were very difficult to get reservations for. But today, as you point out, I think things have gotten pretty crazy. they are very different. And I think a big part of that is that there's a whole secondary market of buying and selling reservations online.

Schwab: Well, let's say you want to book a busy place that's been booked for weeks. What are those new methods? What are my options?

Iscoe: So what you see when you log into OpenTable or Resy trying to get a reservation that's hard to get is not really a reflection of reality. These kinds of buzzy, trendy restaurants in New York or Los Angeles or wherever we are only put a fraction of their tables online. And this isn't exactly new, right? Restaurants didn't set up tables for celebrities, VIPs, big spenders of wine, and friends of the managers. However, the table that is actually displayed will probably only be visible for a few minutes. Then, minutes later, a bot or scalper snatches up the reservation and sells it back online to the highest bidder.

Schwab: Who is this scalper? Are they updating their booking pages like we are?

Isco: Yeah, they call themselves mercenaries and they call themselves hustlers on a website called AppointmentTrader.com. That means sophomores at Ivy League universities are using bots to make reservations, and industry professionals like hotel concierges, bartenders, maitre d'ôtes and cooks are selling reservations, sometimes risking their jobs. There is. One of the interesting stories I heard of him was about a college student from a wealthy family who borrowed his parents' Amex black card, called the concierge at his Amex Centurion, and had him reserve a table that was hard to get. The reservation was being resold online. So people are going to extreme measures to get reservations and then selling them online.

Schwab: So it's pretty profitable. How profitable is this market?

Iscoe: As you know, last year AppointmentTrader generated approximately $6 million in restaurant reservations. But people like hustlers, mercenaries, and scalpers also make a lot of money. I talked to a student at Brown University who said he makes between $70,000 and $80,000 a year in pre-order sales. Currently, if he logs in to buy a 5 o'clock two-top at 4 Charles Prime Rib in the West Village of New York, the current price is he $410. And that's before I eat the $130 dry-aged bone-in ribeye steak.

Schwab: Well, a lot of the restaurants you mentioned are elite, trendy, high-end restaurants. But are restaurateurs worried that this reservation-reselling business will seep into more average or casual restaurants?

Iscoe: I think the really important thing to note about all of this is that it all depends on where you want to eat. Perfectly good restaurants all over the city have perfectly good tables and it's not that difficult to get a reservation. I mean, there's an amazing number of restaurants in New York, he'd say as many as 25,000. What we're talking about here are really hard-to-get, lively spots that are coveted by certain people who want to eat out on special occasions, date nights, and more. of course. It remains to be seen whether this will trickle down to her other 10,000 restaurants. I'll just have to take a look.

Schwab: So there's an element of data sharing between these apps so that some reservations can actually track how much you spend on wine, for example. What do restaurants and the companies collecting the data think about it?

Isco: High-end restaurants have always made notes about their guests by writing things like HSM (fat man) or WW (wine lover) (people who spend a lot of money on wine) on their guest profiles. But as you said, these digital reservation platforms now allow restaurateurs to record a lot more about us, the customers. How often do you come, how much do you pay, and do you just sit at a nice table with a bowl of soup? So I think there's kind of a new model emerging for restaurant reservations, just like other aspects of the economy.

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