Overall, I don't think the restaurants have a particularly strong incentive to solve this problem.
This is the identical to early perspective on the secondary market in event ticketing: a sale is a sale, our work is done.
That means the restaurant is undercharging.
Then you realize how much money you are losing to arbitrage and the work begins.
A couple of decades later, you have variable pricing, dynamic pricing, distribution to expedia, official secondary market partnerships, conferences, niche-y saas products, competing enterprise products, revenue managers, specialized masters' degrees, papers at INFORMs, revenue directors, VPs of sales and revenue,
and a bunch of people who just want to cook and eat
The complexity is added to achieve a complex goal. In the case of airlines, it's so that you can walk up to the ticket counter 45 minutes before a flight, slap down a wad of cash, and get on that flight... while still ensuring that every plane goes out completely full even when that rare event doesn't happen.
For restaurants, the complexity they're adding is fairness. They don't want to only cook for rich people, they want to cook for everyone. But their food is so good that if you sorted the net worth of every customer every night descending and invited customers in in that order, there would never be a person in the restaurant with less than 100 million dollars. So, to ensure that net worth isn't a factor on who gets admitted, they have to add operational complexity, basically distributing tickets by random lottery and ensuring that people can't sell those tickets.
The current system is basically a competitive auction with extra steps. The competitive auction ensures that only the people with the most money can eat at your restaurant. If you are a restaurant and you don't like that, then there is no choice but to move to a different system. If you're fine with it, keep doing what you're doing. Many restaurants already do that and they are full every single night.
As other commenters have shared, there are big disincentives for restaurants to turn people away at the door - they don't get paid, and it is negative experience for both sides (with commensurate brand effects).
Bulk-generating accounts -- email addresses, phone numbers and even credit card numbers -- is a solved problem for resellers.
In New York State, it is illegal to restrict transfer of tickets. Expect the same for reservations as this battle advances.
It sucks being able to not resell a ticket when plans change, but I'd assume that these days, the convenience of being able to do that is more than offset by the amount lost to scalpers.
Yes. Either through simply carrying many cards (see the binders of credit cards in documentaries on ticket resellers) or getting many numbers issued against a single account by a friendly bank. These were popular in the 00's and 10's. I expect both techniques are no longer state-of-the-art.
I think this is actually common now. I'm often asked to make a deposit on a reservation when using Resy.
I'm not aware that there is variable or dynamic pricing component to it, however. That's a great idea and something I bet they are considering.
In practice, dynamic pricing it is not a panacea. You still need to beat the arbitrage market. Charge too much: customers don't reserve. Charge too little: brokers snap it up.
On Resy, at least, there is not dynamic pricing (though, in theory, restaurants can apply different deposit/cancel fees to different "reservation types", or different days. But nothing dynamic based on demand or anything)
From your friends in event ticketing: welcome to the struggle, and we're sorry.
I hope Resy figures this out, and I hope we're able to learn from (or license) their solution.
I expect their approach will look similar to our path: fight the secondary market with every legal tool, work with them when you can't, improve pricing algorithms to reduce arbitrage opportunity.
Customers on both sides of their market will probably be frustrated with each effort. They want to cook and eat, not "be in a marketplace". They will probably blame Resy.
The secondary market will probably engage legislative resources, attempting to tailor the law to protect their practices. They will probably do this "in the interest of diners". It will probably become illegal to restrict transfer of reservations, among other things.
Good luck y'all. Reach out if you need support. Love, Broadway
The ticketing industry could completely stop reselling if they wanted to. Require the person who purchases the tickets to be the person who uses the ticket. No transferring, no reselling. But companies would lose out on all that sweet scalper cash, plus they would have to have a virtually unlimited refund policy to deal with legitimately unneeded tickets. I always figured that one-two punch of revenue loss is what prevents ticketing companies from saving us from this hell they've created.
But then again, e.g. in New York, it's apparently also illegal to resell a ticket for more than 10% above its face value, yet ticket scalping does not seem to be a solved problem...
The first-sale doctrine says the ticket industry could not, in fact, stop reselling.
That said, your plan is one ticket per identified person, that you can't buy 4 tickets at a time for you and your friends? Not sure that'll fly, even with people who hate Ticketmaster.
Ticket marketplaces take fees on every transaction, so incentivizing multiple transactions on a single ticket is in their interest.
Additionally, resale fees tend to be higher, on a percentage basis, and prices tend to be higher on resale tickets for high demand events.
But this does not mean ticket marketplaces are incentivized to sell to resellers initially instead of actual event-goers.
Primary prices and fees are lower because artists and venues demand it. Ticketmaster's continued ability to source tickets to high demand events is more important than marginal revenue from resale on even a large number of those tickets.
In addition to being generally legal in the US, in key markets, resale cannot legally be constrained. A venue or artist cannot legally institute policies or practices to prohibit resale.
Even if resale were prohibited or technically impossible, it will not necessarily be any easier to get tickets to a high demand event as resale is only a factor when an event has enough demand to sell out far in advance of playing.
Resale is prohibited for (some?) ticketmaster events, unless you resell through Ticketmaster, allowing them to double-dip on the transaction fee.
So, it would be hard for them to make the argument you are making. They directly profit from resale (that they “can’t legally ban”) because their ban on resale is legal.
More fundamentally: once you buy the ticket, it's yours. It should be your decision to resell it if you choose, for any reason. It's a "First sale doctrine" sort of thing in my mind.
