Photo Credit: Meredith Jenks.

Year in Review

The Year in Resy 2017

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Another year is all but in the books. Here, we take a moment to note a small handful of themes, ideas, metrics and trends that drove our thinking this year and will guide us in 2018 and beyond.

 

1. The Unbundling of Demand

When we talk about how restaurant marketing is evolving, a big part of that change is being driven by shifting demand dynamics. The days of monolithic demand-drivers being the answer are long gone, for two big reasons: 1) Buying demand in bulk is expensive (1-3% of annual topline revenue); 2) Customers aren’t one size fits all. In 2017, the ten most popular restaurants on Resy generated more than 1,000,000 waitlist covers via Notify. That’s an additional 100,000 covers of reservation liquidity per venue!

This is an entirely new scale source of demand, and that’s just the beginning. In 2018, look for us to expand our roster of demand-side partners, and engage with each to uniquely drive engagement. What we’re working on with Airbnb is potentially the biggest evolution of the restaurant business model in a decade.

2. Understanding Feedback

In early October, we announced the acquisition of Servy, a next-generation feedback tool for restaurants. We did this because we want to help restaurants get better. The most important way we can do that is by giving them more visibility on performance— both quantitative and qualitative. Our integrated product, which provides feedback contextualized from booking through payment — and includes variables like server, wait time, pacing, and itemized check — is now in open beta. In 2018, this will help restaurants control their own destiny by eliminating blindspots and ensuring they’re delivering a viable product.

3. We Are Purveyors of Fine Hospitality Products

If you’ve heard our sales pitch, you’ve heard us say that Resy uses technology to drive hospitality. In short, we’re obsessed with shipping product that brings restaurants and customers closer together. When you do that, good things happen. For example, as a result of our live 2-way SMS communication system (not just an automated Confirmation Text, but a real, low-friction, realtime channel to the host stand) our global no-show rate is under 5%. Many restaurants use this feature to keep their no-show rates below 2%. Not only does that save restaurants from lost revenue, but when one considers the savings in labor hours if no one has to make hundreds of calls a day, there’s no turning back to the dark ages. This is just the beginning, too. We also shipped a fully secure, Level 1 PCI compliant third party credit card handling system, which will make it easier to, say, send a loved one a bottle of wine on their birthday.

So, that’s how we spent our time in 2017. What does 2018 have in store? More cities, more countries, more restaurants, and more daring hospitality technology. The future is bright, friends. We’ll see you there!