SevenRooms Is the Stealth Competitor to Resy That Tracks Your Restaurant Spending in Real Time

Let’s say you’re dining at Lure Fishbar in Soho on a weeknight for dinner. The room is packed, the lights are low, and you’re sitting in a booth with friends, kicking things off with a bottle of Champagne. As it turns out, without even going over to your table, owner John McDonald and his managers know what you and your tablemates are spending in real time, as you’re spending it. Based on your previous visits to any restaurant in the Mercer Street Hospitality group – Bar Tulix and Hancock Street, for example — they know your dietary restrictions and your wine preferences; how often you’ve visited a spot in the restaurant group; how much you spend on average, per night, and per year. And that’s not just about you: They know that info on everyone sitting down at all their restaurants.

Mercer Street Hospitality has signed up with SevenRooms, a platform that differentiates itself from competitors like the uber-trendy Resy for its emphasis on data collection. The restaurant industry and foodservice industry — forecast to reach $1 trillion in sales in 2024 — is in the middle of a “data-driven transformation,” with restaurants becoming increasingly reliant on data collection for survival. In this post-pandemic landscape in which restaurants are competing for diners more than ever — as they’re navigating staff shortages, price hikes, and other challenges — data can be key in the battle for luring diners, they say.

Seven Rooms

Back in 2018, restaurateurs told the Wall Street Journal that “using customer data to tailor menus to their tastes can give them a leg up.” Today, add-on services for point-of-service apps like Square, digital marketing newsletters, and restaurant apps like OpenTable or Resy can provide restaurant groups with some data. But SevenRooms provides a degree of specificity for hospitality — particularly when it comes to sit-down spots and higher-end dining.

“It’s fast; it’s seamless; and it’s really easy,” McDonald says of SevenRooms. “There’s nothing else like it out there on the market.”

Few restaurants want to admit they’re collecting information on you, even if SevenRooms is not alone in this endeavor. Beyond the concerns of privacy, “data collection” doesn’t exactly have a sexy ring. In short, it sounds corporate and calculated, not exactly a recipe for a vibe.

So it’s not much of a surprise that, as a diner, you’re likely not aware of SevenRooms — and that’s the point. Yet its tools are aware of you, or at least how you spend within a restaurant, hotel, or restaurant group that uses them. With the platform, should you choose to splurge on that $3,000 bottle of wine, it could be all hands on deck, with every manager getting an alert.

“It’s an operations and marketing platform,” says a spokesperson. SevenRooms can parse seating arrangements so that some tables are earmarked for Resy, some for OpenTable, and others for Google and direct-to-the-website reservations. It steps up service for VIPs who may not have the coveted American Express Platinum hawked by Resy. And it’s more fluid in that restaurateurs are using it to plug and play among various reservation platforms quickly and on the fly. (If you can’t get seats at your favorite spot on Resy, that’s just what’s available on that platform: Other seats in the same restaurant at the same time might be available on OpenTable or SevenRooms.)

Seven Rooms

Let’s say a diner wants to book a reservation for Portale at 7 p.m. on a Friday. OpenTable no longer has a time slot between 5:30 and 9 p.m., but if a diner books directly on the website — controlled by SevenRooms — they have options for a reservation that same day between 6:45 and 9 p.m., as well as the ability to choose their seating area, a scenario a SevenRooms spokesperson shows me.

The same can be true with Resy. For a reservation on a recent Thursday at 7 p.m., Resy no longer has any time slots for dinner at Ci Siamo. But the restaurant’s website had options for a reservation at 5:00, 8:30, 8:45, and 9:00 p.m.

Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group uses SevenRooms in conjunction with Resy. Amanda Kehr, the group’s director of events and guest experience, says that, “SevenRooms dramatically reduces the manual work of running a successful shift — tasks like stitching together historical information on our guests’ needs and preferences, plotting tables on the floor plan to optimize the flow of service, tracking a table’s stage in their dining experience to quote wait times, and so much more.”

Who else is using it? At the moment, not trendy, newer restaurants, but generally the more established restaurateurs and corporate Midtown spots. Mercer Street Hospitality uses it in conjunction with Open Table and Resy. Along with USHG, other users include Altamarea Group (Marea, Morini, Ai Fiori); In Good Company Hospitality (Park Avenue Tavern, The Wilson); Noho Hospitality (Locanda Verde, The Dutch, Lafayette, Carne Mare); Portale; RBM Restaurants (Sarabeth’s, Jane); Gerber Group (The Campbell, Mr Purple); SH Hotels (1 Hotel Central Park — JAMS); Virgin Hotels (Everdene); and Brandit Group (Maison Close), among others. SevenRooms is a global company in 300 cities around the world, with companies like London’s Harrods food and beverage recently switching over to SevenRooms. Several restaurants that Eater reached out to did not want to speak on or off the record about it.

Seven Rooms

Founded by Joel Montaniel, Allison Page, and Kinesh Patel in 2011, the cloud-based data platform is named for Graydon Carter’s “Seven Rooms” theory: “There are seven consecutive rooms in New York. Just when you think you’re at the best place or top spot, there’s always another room you don’t have access to or one that you haven’t discovered yet.”

Since it started, SevenRooms has landed over $70 million in funding; initial investors include chef and restaurateur Thomas Keller and Nathan’s Famous hot dogs. In 2018, it became the first reservations platform to get money from Amazon’s Alexa fund, Business Insider reported.

That same year, the platform integrated with Instagram and Google to offer restaurant reservations via Google Search and Maps, which alone can bring in a significant percentage of reservations for some restaurants. It’s also integrated with Facebook, Tripadvisor, and Alexa, among others. The integrations are key — as the data platform tracks how people decide on where to dine. Among SevenRooms clients who are using Google integration, for example, CEO of SevenRooms Joel Montaniel told Skift Table that 10 to 30 percent of reservations are arriving through Google. (The company confirms those numbers are still accurate, several years after reporting.)

Seven Rooms

Fast forward to 2023, and SevenRooms has also started offering features to lure in diners to spend more money. This includes Priority Alerts, which controls who restaurants send automated restaurant availability reservations to, “so they can prioritize their most valuable guests … whether that’s a VIP, loyalty member, frequent or recent diner, local, high spender, or someone else,” reads the press release, and, in a dig at Resy, “not just an exclusive subset of credit card holders. This helps restaurants reward their most valuable guests to get them through their doors most often.” SevenRooms also offers a private line that allows for calls and messaging that restaurants can offer to VIPs looking for last-minute reservations and special requests.

In June 2023, SevenRooms released a study based on consumer data of venues using the platform on how diners decide on where to dine, citing the power of word-of-mouth recommendations. “Nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of diners hear about or discover new restaurants from friends, family and co-workers; 33 percent via Google, 29 percent searching social media for restaurant profiles; and 22 percent through social media influencers or trusted sources,” they reported. “Only a small percentage use third-party platforms such as OpenTable (9 percent) and Resy (3 percent) to discover new restaurants.”

Seven Rooms

By November, it was offering a loyalty program, called Word-of-Mouth, referrals that give restaurants the ability to reward frequent diners, noting there are “dollars left on the table” by not tapping into regulars. The program makes it easier to be rewarded with perks without the awkwardness of, say, coupons or gift certificates.

It’s somewhat like the loyalty platform Blackbird from Ben Leventhal (who co-founded Eater in 2005), which tags diners who sign up for free, tracks their restaurant visits, identifies repeat customers, and rewards them with perks, such as free drinks or desserts. But Blackbird is different in that it is a go-between the consumer and the restaurant, making its presence known in securing status upgrades, points, and perks. SevenRooms is more behind the scenes.

SevenRooms and the restaurants that use it frame the platform as a benefit for diners in that it improves customers’ experience — but not every diner is going to be okay with having their spending habits so closely monitored. Yet SevenRooms confirms the data is owned by the restaurant clients — and it’s not being sold for marketing purposes to the highest bidder. “We’re focused on making sure restaurants are the sole owners of their data so they can use it to improve the in-service guest experience,” says a spokesperson.

Back at Lure, McDonald notes the value of using multiple platforms like Resy and OpenTable, which he calls customer acquisition tools.

“There is no single solution. You can use the best parts of each one,” he says. “But with SevenRooms, it puts the power in your own hands once you have the customer. The information really is the power.”