DoorDash takes on Resy, OpenTable as restaurant reservation wars heat up

Now available on your favorite food delivery app: restaurant reservations.

The still-simmering reservation wars of the last decade could fully reignite this year, as a shifting tech landscape pits some of the biggest players against each other to capture businesses and users alike. Reservation incumbents, delivery app newcomers and premium credit card partnerships are all ramping up the fight for a shrinking pool of diners.

Delivery giant DoorDash announced in June its $1.2 billion acquisition of SevenRooms, a reservation platform focused on direct bookings through a restaurant’s own website. Several months earlier, UberEats and Booking Holdings’ OpenTable announced a partnership to integrate reservations on Uber’s app. And in 2024, American Express, already the owner of Resy, bought Tock, a reservation platform focused on upscale restaurants, for $400 million.

“It’s three very large, very ambitious, very well-resourced companies all vying for the same exact piece of real estate, which is high-demand restaurants,” Resy and Eater founder Ben Leventhal told CNBC.

Resy was bought by AmEx in 2019, and today Leventhal — a strategic advisor for Resy until 2022 — focuses on Blackbird Labs, a loyalty program for independent restaurants that he founded that same year.

The reservation wars initially kicked off more than 10 years ago. Leventhal’s Resy burst onto the scene in 2014 and won market share, undercutting OpenTable’s legacy business, by charging eateries a simple monthly fee.

At the time, OpenTable, which was founded in 1998, charged restaurants both a monthly fee and a cover for each diner who booked through the platform. These days, the company still sometimes charges a variable cover fee for seated diners, depending on the establishment.

Despite Resy’s rise and buzzy partnerships with high-profile restaurants, OpenTable still significantly outstrips its rival by restaurant count.

Starting this summer, Resy will integrate the 5,000 eateries, bars and wineries that have listed on Tock onto its own platform, bringing its total number of venues to about 25,000. That’s still less than half of OpenTable’s roughly 60,000 restaurants.

But where OpenTable has scale, Resy has a “cool factor” and strong positioning in major cities, like New York, where dining out is big business.

And each companies’ relationships with credit card companies has added a new layer to the war, too.

Platinum American Express cardholders get special access to restaurant reservations at sought-after establishments, plus a $400 dining credit per year to use at Resy restaurants.

“We know that American Express card members spend close to $90 billion a year … on dining, and it’s a passion area for them,” Resy CEO Pablo Rivero told CNBC. “And we know that they also spend more. People with a Resy credit on an American Express card spend over 25% more on dining transactions.”

Likewise,…