Guest Opinion | Bret Thompson: Reservation Platform Policy Changes Adding to Restaurants’ Burden

Running two restaurants in Southern California is not for the faint of heart. Between staffing, high food costs, and ensuring quality service for customers, there is no shortage of challenges.

Our restaurants — Pez Coastal Kitchen and Pez Cantina — rely on a mix of third-party vendors to help manage our reservations. These platforms have, for the most part, made our job more streamlined and helped us reach potential customers, regardless of whether they use Resy, SevenRooms, or another reservation website. Unfortunately, one of the largest reservation platforms we work with is implementing changes that would significantly limit our flexibility with a deceptively subtle revision to their terms and conditions.

In March, OpenTable announced changes to its terms of service that require restaurants to treat its platform as the “primary system of record” for all reservations and guest data. On the surface, that might sound like a minor technical update. In practice, it’s a huge change that sets a worrisome standard for restaurant owners across the country.

Here is what OpenTable’s requirement really means for restaurants: if you want to offer reservation bookings through multiple platforms, as many restaurant owners do, you now have to manage those reservations across separate systems that do not talk to each other. What that looks like in reality is that for a busy Saturday dinner or a sold-out Sunday brunch, staff must manually update the reservation lists, guessing which tables are actually available, and hoping no table gets double-booked. And when things go wrong, restaurants are left to shoulder the blame, whether from loyal regulars or new guests whose first impression is now tainted.

What makes this especially frustrating is that it doesn’t have to be this way. In almost every other part of the travel and hospitality industry, businesses list their inventory across multiple platforms without issue. Hotels appear on Expedia, Booking.com, and their own websites simultaneously. Airlines do the same. This is how modern marketplaces can and should work. In fact, Booking.com owns OpenTable, and they still want to change the rules for restaurants. That same open market and communication should extend across the industry, not make life harder for a single sector.

The Latino Restaurant Association, which I am proud to be a part of, exists to support and advocate for Latino restaurant owners up and down California and across the country. Our members are hardworking, independent operators who have already been through years of pandemic shutdowns, rising costs, and a brutal labor market. We know what it takes to run a business, and how important it is to have flexibility from trusted, reliable vendor partners.

When restaurateurs can’t freely choose the tools that work best for us, it doesn’t just impact how much our dining rooms fill up — it hurts guests, too. You might search for a table at your favorite spot, and find it’s no longer listed because they couldn’t afford the headache of using multiple platforms. The whole system of choice breaks down.

We rely on technology every day so we can focus on what brought us into this business: building and sharing our family recipes with other Angelenos. Restaurants are tough enough to run without added restrictions limiting our ability to reach new customers and manage our front of house systems. We should be able to run our dining rooms and reservations with the tools that work best for us without being strong-armed into choosing just one reservation system.

I urge OpenTable to reconsider this policy. Talk to restaurant owners. Understand what our operations actually look like. And work with us to build a stronger platform that provides more opportunities, not limits them.

Bret Thompson is the owner of Pez Coastal Kitchen in Pasadena and Pez Cantina in Downtown Los Angeles, and is a Latino Restaurant Association Board Member.