(NewsNation) — A college sophomore made $70,000 last year reselling restaurant reservations, earning as much as $1,050 off a table at Carbone.
He’s one of many using apps such as Resy and Appointment Trader to book reservations and resell them for a profit, according to a recent report in The New Yorker.
Resellers can earn tens of thousands of dollars per year by spotting, securing and selling high-demand spots, sometimes using bots to boost efficiency. They may provide fake names, phone numbers and email addresses to book tables they never intend on using and, in some cases, risk their jobs as hotel concierges and restaurant employees to turn a profit on the side.
The practice can make it harder for restaurantgoers to snag reservations of their own and requires restaurants to track down fake accounts. It’s not a foolproof plan for resellers, either.
When a reservation doesn’t sell, it’s the restaurant’s loss, but resellers may face penalties.
An official at Appointment Trader told The New Yorker that resellers with unsold listings may lose access to the site.
The practice is a way of fighting back against what the Appointment Trader representative called “script kiddies” who use bots to “book a thousand reservations with the hopes of selling fifty of them.”
Although some restaurants rely on reservation software and algorithms that prioritize diners based on visit frequency and how much they’re spending, others have avoided the resell runaround by sticking with old practices and booking tables by hand over the phone.