Card Networks and Issuers See Restaurant Booking Platforms as Top-of-Wallet Opportunity

Dining out is getting more expensive. Consumers continue to spend on their cards, but the pace may be pressured.

Issuers want to be top-of-mind and top-of-wallet for restaurant spending, and payment networks benefit from consumer resilience.

Several pacts, partnerships and acquisitions between issuers, payment networks and various restaurant platforms seek to shore up that spending, fostering a sense of exclusivity, with rewards in the mix too.

This blending of ecosystems can benefit everyone and encompass advertising, restaurant discovery, convenience and payments.

Reservations and Restaurant Discovery

Visa, for example, partnered with restaurant tech company OpenTable in July and debuted the “Visa Dining Collection.” The collaboration offers eligible Visa cardholders “exclusive access” to restaurant reservations and events. It also rewards diners for using their cards at these restaurants. The eventual expansion into 2025 will include dozens of cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico, spanning hundreds of restaurants.

Separately, Resy, a restaurant reservation and management platform, was acquired by American Express in 2019. This year, Amex bought technology providers Tock and Rooam to expand its suite of digital tools for restaurants. In remarks on the company’s most recent earnings call, Amex CEO Steve Squeri said the “Resy dining reservation platform has seen significant growth since its acquisition in 2019, and our planned acquisitions of Tock and Rooam will further expand our dining portfolio, giving our customers access to more great restaurants and increasing the digital offerings we provide to restaurants and merchants in the food and beverage industry.”

Buying the infrastructure also expands how guests can pay, including at the table, and offers a conduit to extend offers and rewards at the point of sale.

J.P. Morgan bought The Infatuation in 2021 to help expand its reach with restaurants and the benefits offered for dining out.

There’s ample evidence that the digital discovery of restaurants and the digital delivery of the sense of exclusivity will find a widening embrace. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Connected Dining: Word of Mouth in the Digital Age” found that more than half of consumers surveyed said they had looked at advertisements and promotions — including special offers and events — as they considered where to eat. Separately, PYMNTS Intelligence’s “How the World Does Digital” report revealed that consumers spent about 12.5 “activity days” online researching or engaging with restaurants via apps or aggregators.

Payments and Rewards

For restaurants, the boon of reservations is that they know how seats will be filled (and what the turnover will be) on a given day. The certainty that diners will be coming through the door leads to confidence about how to run the business and what’s working in terms of the menus — and all of it translates into better cash flow.

The melding of content, promotions and a sticky base of restaurants that promote credit card spending on-premise come as more than one-third of cardholders want card-linked offers from restaurants, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Leveraging Item-Level Receipt Data: How Personalized Card-Linked Offers Drive Store Card Usage.”

The yearning for rewards may be especially acute given that, per the latest retail sales from the Census Bureau, the prices paid month over month in August at restaurants were 0.3% higher while overall spending was essentially flat.