Edit on 02/16/2025
Effective February 17, 2025, AppointmentTrader will comply fully with NY GBL §391-w.

No new transactions for New York-based restaurants will be listed, advertised, promoted or sold without proper authorization.
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Dear AppointmentTrader Community,

Governor Kathy Hochul of New York State signed a bill today which will become effective on February 17th, 2025 that seeks to prevent third party platforms from selling restaurant reservations.⁴⁾

I remember vividly what made me start working on this platform. At 7:55 am on a Monday, I saw a line of easily one hundred people lined up in front of a Las Vegas DMV, all of them waiting to get a ‘walk-in appointment’.


After asking some of them how long they had been waiting, the first ones in line pointed out a sleeping sack and said they were here all night.


I thought – this must be some freak occurrence and came back the next day to see if it was any different – to my surprise it was the same, so I went back a couple more times only to learn that every day looked like this.


I thought to myself – if you imagine that every day looks like this – this one inefficient DMV wastes one hundred human lifetimes just waiting in line.


That’s what made me realize that an efficient market for any timeslot is currently not existent and is urgently needed.


Fast forward $14m+ in appointment trades that earned many people an honest, fully taxed living and allowed thousands of poeple to dine at places they otherwise wouldn't have been able to visit, we received more than 10m views on a handful of viral X posts following a story in the New Yorker in May of this year, which triggered regulation that was pushed through assembly and senate within only four weeks (!). ⁴⁾


If you take a look under the hood to find out who lobbied for the bill – you will learn that American Express (owner of Resy) is a major backer ¹⁾ , who coincidentally (?) just recently purchased prepaid reservations platform Explore Tock for $400,000,000 ²⁾ and is giving 'accessibility perks' to its platinum cardholders (please see my first post in this thread) - a quote from the NY Times DealBook summit of Elon Musk comes to mind:


“What I care about is the reality of Goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people that care about looking good, while doing evil.” 3)


In this case this seems to apply to legislation that is claiming to 'help families lower the cost of dining' while truly helping a multibillion dollar corporation to lock down coveted restaurant reservations by attempting to destroy an open market where people buy and sell reservations for an average of ~$100.


It is also interesting to see that this bill is exclusively backed by restaurants, restaurants associations and a credit card company – but not one consumer agency – which does make sense.


Our customers are the end-customers – Resy’s customers are restaurants – go figure.


If we fail to make this right by February 17th, not one more non-industry or non-wealthy person can go to the Corner Store, Carbone, 4 Charles Prime Rib or Tatiana than before as they will not want to prepay thousands of dollars and as there is more demand than supply the few truly free reservations will still be snatched up by bots (as ironically enough, botting was not outlawed in this bill) and be sold on actual 'black markets' unlike ours, which is quite the opposite considering our 'sell-through-rate' requirement of 50%, alongside customer and seller refund guarantees.


I want to stress one thing: I very much respect the parties mentioned above – American Express has built a spectacular business and if I was in their shoes I might try to leverage my market dominance in the same way – but I have a hard time how this is “helping-the-people”.


I am 100% convinced that removing pricing from commodities that experience more demand than supply will not make them any more available – quite the opposite is true.


Due to this fact I’d like to ask the Appointment Trader community to use this thread as a platform to document when they encounter how credit card companies & restaurants are trying to leverage being oversold in a way that benefits a few rather than allowing an open market to exist.


I will make the first post as an example below.


Many Thanks to our Customers and Sellers,

Yours Truly,

Jonas


1) Resy Support of Bill A10210 Statement


2) Bloomberg Report on Amex $400m Explore Tock Acquisition

3) Reddit Comments About Elon Musks Statement

4) Bill A10215 Official Site