Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
Automated booking bots break the terms of service of Resy, OpenTable, and Tock, which ban automated access and fake accounts, and they can get accounts, phone numbers, and payment methods banned and their tables canceled. Aggressive automation can also brush up against laws on unauthorized computer access. Being alerted to an opening and booking it yourself is not a bot booking.
Selling a restaurant reservation is prohibited by the major platforms' terms and by most restaurants' policies, and it is increasingly restricted by law. New York State passed General Business Law section 391-w in 2024, targeting third-party reservation resale done without the restaurant's agreement, and other jurisdictions have weighed similar rules. The clear trend is that paid resale of tables the restaurant never agreed to sell is being restricted.
Reservation resale marketplaces such as AppointmentTrader operate in a contested and tightening space, because reselling reservations violates the terms of Resy, OpenTable, and Tock, and New York has passed a law aimed at third-party resale without restaurant agreement. This page is general information and not legal advice, so treat any specific service as its own question and read its current terms.
The bigger risk to a buyer is practical rather than personal, because a resold reservation is usually booked under a fake name and against platform rules, so the restaurant can cancel it on sight and leave you with no table and no refund. Whether an individual buyer faces legal exposure depends on the jurisdiction, but the reliable downside is losing both the reservation and the money.
Yes, restaurants routinely cancel or void reservations that they discover were resold or booked under a name that does not match the guest. Many hard tables confirm the name on the booking, and some tie a card or a deposit to it, so a reservation bought from a stranger is fragile and can vanish at the door.
Yes, an availability alert is the clean lane, because it does not book or sell anything. A service like SnagRes watches the restaurant's own pages and notifies a real person when a table opens, and that person books it themselves in their own name through the normal platform, which is an ordinary reservation rather than a resale or a bot booking.
No, and it never will. We hold no booking logins, never place or hold a reservation, and charge nothing per booking. You get told a table exists and you book it yourself. That is why there is no account of yours for a platform to ban, and it is also why you have to be free to act when the alert lands.
Usually not. Across the rooms we watch we recorded 7,048 release events in at most 22 days of observation, so seats do come free at restaurants people call impossible. What varies is the date, the hour and the party size: Monkey Bar released no two-top across the 30 dates in its window while a four-top came free on 6 of them.
The three approaches are compared side by side in alerts, bots and resale, the resale marketplaces specifically in the AppointmentTrader write-up, and the paid-membership version of the same promise in what Dorsia is.
Every service in the category, including the ones that cover far more restaurants than we do, is listed in reservation alert services compared. The release hours behind the numbers above are on when each restaurant releases tables, and the full study is at the study these figures come from.
Three very different things get lumped together whenever people ask whether reservation bots are legal, and separating them is the whole answer. A booking bot automates the act of grabbing tables, often by creating fake accounts and racing real diners to newly released slots. A resale marketplace treats a confirmed reservation as a product and sells it to the highest bidder, usually under a name that does not match the guest. An availability alert does neither, because it only tells a real person that a table has opened so that person can book it through the restaurant's normal system.
The legal and policy questions attached to each are not the same, so an honest answer has to keep them apart. The distinction that matters is whether the service touches the reservation itself. A bot makes one as you. A reseller sells one to you. An alert never holds, makes, or transfers a booking at any point.
The rest of this page walks through each practice in turn, from the aggressive end of the spectrum to the ordinary end, and then through what we can measure about the tables these services are competing over.
A booking bot auto-grabs inventory at scale, frequently using fake accounts, to snipe or hoard tables.
A resale marketplace charges money to transfer a confirmed reservation from one party to another.
An availability alert simply notifies a human when a table opens, and that human books it themselves.
Only the first two require a service to act on a reservation. That is the line the platforms' terms and New York's 2024 law both draw.
Automated bots that scrape inventory and auto-book tables sit in the riskiest lane, mostly because of what they have to do to work. Resy, OpenTable, and Tock all prohibit automated access and the use of fake or duplicate accounts in their terms of service, so a bot that snipes prime slots or hoards them for resale is breaking those rules on its face. The consequence is rarely a courtroom and usually an account action, because platforms ban the accounts, blacklist the associated names, phone numbers, and payment methods, and cancel the tables those accounts hold.
Beyond the platforms' own rules, aggressive automation can brush up against broader laws about unauthorized access to computer systems and deceptive business practices, especially where fake identities or the evasion of technical blocks are involved. The practical takeaway is simpler than the legal theory, because a bot that pretends to be many people in order to beat real diners is designed to violate the terms it operates under, and the people running it carry that risk.
There is a detail worth holding onto if you are considering paying for one. An auto-booking service has to act as you, which means it holds your login. If the platform decides an account is automated, the account it bans is yours rather than the vendor's, and the tables it cancels are the ones you were counting on.
Selling a restaurant reservation for money is the practice that regulators and restaurants have moved against most directly. Reselling reservations is prohibited by the terms of service of Resy, OpenTable, and Tock, and by the policies of most restaurants, which treat a table as a courtesy extended to a named guest rather than a transferable asset. When a restaurant discovers that a reservation was resold or booked under a fake name, it routinely cancels or voids the booking, and the buyer arrives to no table.
The law has begun to catch up with the marketplaces as well. New York State passed a law in 2024, General Business Law section 391-w, targeting third-party reservation reselling done without the restaurant's agreement. It is aimed squarely at services that scoop up tables and charge for them, and other jurisdictions have taken up similar proposals.
The way that law is written is the reason this distinction is not academic. It reaches services that offer or arrange reservations, which is what a resale marketplace and an auto-booker both do. A service that only watches a public booking page and reports what it sees never offers or arranges anything, so it sits outside the practice the statute describes. The direction of travel is clear either way, because paid resale of reservations the restaurant never agreed to sell is being restricted rather than encouraged.
Buying a reservation from a marketplace carries a specific, practical downside that has little to do with whether you personally broke a law. The reservation you paid for was almost certainly booked under a name that is not yours, or resold in violation of the platform's terms, which means the restaurant can cancel it the moment it notices. People who pay for these bookings can and do show up to find the reservation voided and their money already spent.
There is also the identity problem at the door. Many hard-to-book restaurants confirm the name on the reservation, and some ask for a card or a deposit tied to that name, so a table booked as someone else is fragile by design. Paying a stranger for a reservation puts you at the mercy of both the reseller and the restaurant's willingness to honor a booking it never sanctioned.
The quieter argument against paying is that the tables are not as static as the price implies. Across the rooms we watch we recorded 7,048 separate release events in at most 22 days of observation, so seats do come free, repeatedly, at restaurants people describe as impossible. What is scarce is not availability in general but a particular date at a particular hour.
An availability alert lands in a completely different place, because it does not book anything and it does not sell anything. A tracker like SnagRes watches the restaurant's own reservation pages and tells a real person the moment a table opens up. That person then books it themselves, with their own name and their own account, through the restaurant's normal platform, exactly as if they had happened to refresh at the right second. Nothing is automated on the booking side, no fake account is created, and no reservation changes hands for money.
That is why being alerted is the clean lane. The booking that results is an ordinary reservation in the diner's own name, indistinguishable from one they found by luck, so it does not trigger the resale prohibitions or the anti-bot rules that catch the other two practices. SnagRes alerts you and stops there, and the reservation stays yours from the very first click.
We hold no booking credentials for anyone, hold no tables, and charge nothing per reservation. That is a genuine limitation, since you have to complete the booking yourself and you have to be free when the alert arrives. It is also the reason there is no account of yours to ban and no table of yours to void.
This page is general information and not legal advice, and the rules vary by state and by platform, so check the current terms of the service you are using whenever you need certainty.
The legal question is usually asked by someone deciding whether to pay for a shortcut, so it is worth knowing what the shortcut is buying. We watch 284 rooms in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago and have logged 61,530,416 checks of their live booking calendars as of 19 October 2026, along with 465,235,816 recorded open time slots. That record describes what these rooms release rather than how they are spoken about.
What it shows, repeatedly, is that the scarce thing is a specific slot rather than a table. Carbone logged 300 release events across 22 observed days. On the day of measurement 2 of the 31 dates in its window had a bookable two-top, its most frequently open slot was 11:30 PM, and none of its recorded open slots fell between 7 and 8:30 PM. A bot racing for Carbone is racing for a very late table, and a resale listing for a prime Friday there is selling something the room rarely puts out.
Party size moves the odds more than any tool does. At Monkey Bar, whose calendar reaches 20 days out and whose releases land at 9 AM, a two-top came free on none of the 30 dates in its window while a four-top came free on 6 of them, and ninety-five percent of everything that opened was before 6 PM. Across our list, 31 rooms are easier to book for four than for two and 26 are easier for two than for four.
39 of the 284 rooms with a full measurement record had no bookable two-top on any date in their window, and 16 of those had none for a four-top either.
12 rooms logged open slots but never one between 7 and 8:30 PM, which is the window most people are actually paying a premium for.
Torrisi is a case in point: seventy-eight percent of the slots that came free there were at or after 9 PM, and its most frequently open slot was 10:45 PM.
I Sodi released nothing later than 5:15 PM in the window we measured, and its calendar only reaches 13 days ahead, so a paid shortcut cannot buy a date beyond it.
Thirty rooms never let anyone book more than 14 days ahead. No service, legal or otherwise, can sell you a table a restaurant has not released.
Are reservation bots legal and is it legal to sell restaurant reservations? Reselling breaks platform rules and is being restricted; being alerted is clean.
Are reservation bots legal? Is it legal to sell restaurant reservations?
A plain-language explainer on reservation bots, paid reservation resale, and availability alerts, and which of the three is a clean, allowed booking.
Keep reading: Alerts, bots and resale, side by side · The four reservation platforms compared · The clean way to get a hard table · Set a free availability alert
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SnagRes checks 284 hard-to-book restaurants across four cities and alerts you when one opens. Watching one is free and no card is needed: see the hardest tables right now.