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Tickets for Restaurants: Resos vs. Access Apps vs. Tix: More Than You’d Ever Care to Know
by ButterflyEffect

    It’s been interesting to field the recent influx of emails and calls from the press, app developers, established software companies, and a handful of VCs. Ticketing for restaurants – and more generally variable and/or dynamic pricing – is something that we’ve been wrestling with for years.

    And the press articles have been frustrating to read, simply because they never include real data and they miss the differences between ‘tickets’, ‘reservations’, and ‘pay-for-access apps’… all of which are very different and have different implications for restaurants and customers alike.

    This is my attempt to outline exactly what we’ve done with restaurant tickets, why it’s interesting, and the results of the experiment… along with real data from our restaurants. People tend to treat business data as something that shouldn’t be shared, but I don’t really see the harm in openly examining the data. So the numbers provided are the real numbers from Alinea, Next and the Aviary.

    First, some background and psychology.