The reservation wars and the battle for control is only getting hotter! Let’s be crystal clear, the reservation war isn’t about booking tables, it’s about owning the guest and it’s about control.
This week it was announced that Amex is folding Tock into Resy. It was only a minute ago that DoorDash acquired SevenRooms and Uber and OpenTable Announced Strategic Global Partnership.
Why all this action? Great question!
B/c reservations represent high-intent behavior. When someone books a table, they’re signaling intent, frequency, spend, and occasion. All this creates a potential loyalty opportunity. That’s not just a booking, that’s data gravity.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth, if the platform controls discovery, reservation, payment, and loyalty, then the restaurant may control the food, but not the relationship.
Friends, operators, we’ve seen this movie before. The real war isn’t between Resy vs OpenTable, it’s Brand vs Platform vs Infrastructure.
B/c whoever controls the rails between the guest and the table controls the leverage (and leverage compounds).
In a 5% margin business, you don’t win by being romantic, you win by controlling the layer that can’t be unplugged. The table is just the entry point. The guest graph is the prize.
The reservation war won’t be won by whoever books the most tables, it will be won by whoever owns the relationship between the guest and the seats.
When you have companies like American Express, DoorDash and Uber battling for reservation supremacy, Branded Hospitality needs to compete in the reservation game from a different angle and that’s exactly what we’re doing with our partners at Tablz.
Tablz isn’t a reservation widget, it’s a brand-owned, first-party engagement layer. With Tablz, restaurants own the data (not the platforms). Guests are connected directly to your brand (not to a marketplace). Loyalty, CRM, and promotion live inside the restaurant’s ecosystem. Insights flow to the operator (not the aggregators).
You know how Branded is playing in the reservation wars? Quite simply, we’re not, we’re playing from a completely different value proposition.
Branded believes Tablz matters b/c it shifts power back to the operators. Platforms like OpenTable and Resy have traditionally captured the relationship. Respect.
Tablz transfers that relationship to the restaurant brand and that’s a key strategic edge for operators.
Reservation platforms accumulate guest data off brands. Tablz lets restaurants own it, meaning, better personalization, segmentation, and lifetime value. Instead of paying take-rates or being subject to platform rules, restaurants can drive reservations directly, with lower friction and clearer economics.
For restaurant operators, menus, loyalty integration, special offers, and messaging stay inside the brand’s identity, as opposed to being templated by a marketplace.
Platforms will of course continue to aggregate demand, and they’ll continue to build APIs and network effects. But brands that own the data, own the relationship, and own the economics, they’re the ones that end up with the leverage.
Tablz doesn’t just help restaurants take bookings. It repositions restaurants from being fulfillment nodes in someone else’s ecosystem to owning their guest graph and monetizing it. In the reservation wars, that’s not just a feature. That’s strategy!
To learn more about Tablz and opportunities to engage as an operator or an investor, please click here (or contact me directly).
