As technology has advanced, so has its integration into the food service industry. While the industry has its foot halfway through the door, the Resy app is the epitome of where the tech and food worlds meet.
Over the past two years, Resy has been able to develop its tech and launch its software within six months of them starting the business. Resy is restaurant reservation software that actually gets you exactly what you want. Resy was created by Ben Leventhal and Michael Montero the two came up with the idea when they were thinking about “how inadequate technology is and decided to take restaurant technology and turn it on its head.” Montero said.
This is not the first reservation software to hit the market, but Resy surpasses its competitors in a variety of ways. What makes Resy stand out is its ability to get you exactly what you want. This application is unique in its ability to secure your primetime reservations on short notice. Resy partners with a huge variety of restaurants who believe that the users of Resy are the best restaurant customers because of their simple need for mobile convenient access and that is exactly what Resy provides.
Ben, what should the relationship between technology and restaurants be?
Well, I think there are two big things to consider. One is simply that technology is running restaurants today. In a fine dining context, you know if you’re using Open Table, it’s not going to be integrated with the POS. And so you’ve got this massive disconnect between what the POS knows about your customers and what the restaurant knows about your
customers. Restaurants have seen the kinds of things that are available outside of their business and it’s pretty clear that they want it and that the technology should exist for their business. Restaurant technology should be integrated, it should be easy, it should be intuitive, it should be fairly priced and it should be customizable.
How does Resy provide the level of customizability to the ever-changing hospitality industry?
Out of the technology that’s gotten better and as our thinking as an industry around what hospitality means has evolved. I think there is a real opportunity for folks like myself and restaurant operators to be more collaborative when it comes to building software.
We don’t profess to know that the best way necessarily to kind of like manage your dining room but we have software that can help you and we have the engineers who can help build the exact right solution. So for us, it’s really about being collaborative with the restaurants that we’re working with. A lot of the features that we’ve built are a direct result of collaboration. So rather than telling you what you should be doing. We respect the fact that you happen to know your business. We’re actually going to listen to what it is that you actually need. And then we’re going to adopt that technology to that need.
What are some of the things that your customers have asked for, and what was the response?
I think the lowest hanging fruit in fine dining, which is largely the context that we operate in, is in guest communication. Everything from the confirmation process to a guests ability to communicate with the restaurant.
So when a guest is running late or needs the ability to communicate a special request and dietary restrictions, we use a system that relies on text messaging at its core for all of those different concerns. If you have a reservation at a Resy restaurant, we send you a text message 24 hours in advance to confirm. You reply to confirm and your reservation’s confirmed. There’s no phone call back and forth.
There’s no leaving a message or tracking down somebody at the restaurant, simple confirmation process. If you’re stuck in traffic and you’re running late, you can send the restaurant a text message, and that text message appears on the screen at the host stand, so the restaurant’s not guessing about where you are.
What makes Resy different from Open Table?
One is we’re not charging per cover, we’re not charging, there’s no cost of doing more volume on a platform.
The second thing is just kind of philosophically where our software is. I mean, like I said building something that is all cloud engineered from day one. Building it for tablets, building it for folks that are on their iPhones all the time. It’s just an entirely different kind of software.
Any other insights on the future of Resy and the Industry?
Yeah, we have a product called ResyPay and it’s in beta right now with a couple of restaurants in New York. The key difference between ResyPay and other mobile payment systems is that you can mix payment types. So somebody can pay on ResyPay and somebody else at the table can pay cash and somebody else can pay with credit card. And we did that because we feel like adoption’s going to take a long time. And so for us, it’s more of a question of okay, let’s assume that mobile payment is coming because we kind of know that it is, let’s also assume it’s coming slowly, and let’s assume that the systems that the restaurants are using today are not entirely broken.
And during that period of time, it’s very hard to create a mobile payment solution and require everybody who’s paying to be on that platform. So let’s build something with that kind of understanding and so that’s where we’re coming from with ResyPay. It’s very much early days like I said it’s in beta, it’s in a few restaurants now and we’ll expand it slowly as we learn and improve the product.
Click here to learn more about the Resy app.
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