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Let restaurants prioritize special occasions
Agents beat the clock
Booking a table today means a person clicking through a restaurant's site, entering a party of two, and hoping to be quick. Whoever gets in first wins, whether the booking is for a regular who takes a table every night or for a spouse's 30th birthday. An agent can check every five seconds, and it can do that across every restaurant in every major city instead of one favorite place.
Describing the occasion
Speed is the smaller change. The larger one is that an agent can describe the occasion while the restaurant describes what it wants. A restaurant can ask to prioritize major decade birthdays and big anniversaries, and the agent can match a request for a 30th birthday against that preference.
What both sides get
Users get more of the tables for life events, like a birthday, an anniversary, or a friend in from out of town. Restaurants get a room full of special occasions. Instinct is rebuilding reservations in this one category with partnerships it has yet to announce.
Why do popular tables vanish within minutes?
Many restaurants release tables at a fixed time, often weeks ahead, so demand for the best slots arrives all at once. Reservation platforms such as Resy and Tock made these release moments a familiar ritual for diners. Nick Kokonas, co-owner of the Chicago restaurants Alinea and Next, built a ticketing system around 2011 that sold prepaid seats at set times. That system later became Tock.
How did online booking change restaurants?
Before online booking, a reservation meant a phone call during business hours and a host writing names in a book. OpenTable, founded in San Francisco in 1998, put the reservation book online and made booking from a screen normal. Once reservations became data, restaurants could see no-show rates and repeat guests for the first time. That data is what makes preferences like favoring certain occasions possible to express.
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