I’ve recently seen a couple of high-end restaurants in NYC and L.A. asking for credit card info in advance when making a reservation. At the time I assumed it was a way of disencentivising no-shows, but now I see it’s there to combat parasites enabled by this “disruptor”.
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This has been done for years now already. Some places take the reservation charge off of your final bill, some don’t. When it started (a place in Michigan) it was all over the trade news-did it work, would people put up with it and so on. I suspect most of the places where scalpers make the reservations already charge and the scalpers just increase their prices accordingly.
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That’s already really common in a lot of self-care businesses, like if you book a massage or spa visit. If you cancel before a certain time, you might get a full refund, and the refund diminishes the later you go.
If this restaurant thing is working the way I suspect, with bots snatching up the reservations at the nominal fee, it would be awesome to see someone get one of those reservations, enjoy their whole meal, then just, “put the bill on the credit card number you have on file, thanks.”
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There are a lot of mid tier restaurants in the price range of 30-50 euro like to have reservations, especially if they aren’t big or there are groups of more 4-5 people.
The risk is to go to the restaurant and find that there are no tables available.
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We’ve enshittified our whole world…
I don’t think this is just a tory problem, sadly.
As far as I know, it’s not the place here, I think (maybe it’s more common in other cities?). There is calling ahead for mid-tiers, but not reservations for mid-tiers.
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It would be, but the kind of creeps who make fake reservations will likely use fake or stolen credit card info. Far less of a hassle for the restaurant to ask for the physical card again when it’s time to pay the cheque.
What might be interesting in terms of breaking the “disruptor’s” business model is checking the physical card vs. the one associated with the reservation before the meal. If they don’t match, the customer is informed up-front that while they’re welcome to dine they’ll be charged an additional 10% for using a scalper to secure the reservation.
It’s unlikely to happen since restaurants don’t like to antagonise potential patrons, but the business is already precarious without being Ticketmaster-ised by techbros.
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“You think with a statement like this you can have the duck?”
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If hackers attacked these uninvited middlemen, and damaged their business model, what are they going to do, call the cops? 
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