What will be interesting to see is whether restaurants (especially when there’s also the issue of people making multiple reservations and then no-showing all but the one they wanted most to deal with) start trying to fight this by tying reservations to payment information.
That’s obviously going to be a hard sell for the cheap seats; but those typically have less sought-after reservations; while at the price tier where you probably aren’t going to be paying cash anyway I don’t see people loving the idea, just on contact; but I can see people recognizing that they’ll be handing over their payment card information at one end of the night or the other; and that a reservation that’s free if you show up is probably a better deal than a reservation you cannot get without paying a scalper.
I’m sure that there are more and less effective and more and less tactful and unobtrusive variants, likely room for experimentation; but in a case where people are making a reservation to make a purchase(commonly one that includes alcohol, another place where ID can come into things anyway) it seems like there are some levers to work with to significantly increase the cost of trying to make a reservation you intend for resale or as a backup if you can’t get the one you really want.
