Reservation Arbitrage

Happy Sunday!

I hope you are enjoying a relaxing weekend.

Can’t remember who did it, but a while back I saw someone launch a product that allowed you to “pay to skip the line” at select restaurants. This is cool in theory, but not when you can’t afford to skip the line.

This got me thinking about the implications of taking this idea a step further and building a payments layer onto an app like OpenTable. What if you could sell your reservations?

Of course I mocked this up.

If you take a few seconds to think this idea through, the immediate next question is what would stop someone from making a ton of reservations at a time and then selling them in some sort of strange reservation arbitrage scheme?

The short answer is I don’t know.

Off the top of my head things like a reputation system, limiting the number of reservations you can make, a 3 strike policy, allowing restaurants to turn this one/off, are all quick workarounds I can think of. However, this would need to be heavily tested to see if it’s feasible.

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