Appointment Trader: Inside the Controversial Business of Reselling Restaurant Reservations

The platform that made this possible, Appointment Trader, was launched by a software engineer named Jonas Frey in 2021. Frey told Side Hustles how he was inspired to create the app after a frustrating day waiting for his turn at everybody’s favorite place: the DMV.

“I said, how is it possible that in the United States of America, I’m unable to buy a premium spot at the DMV?” he told us. “How is it that such a mainstream thing isn’t available for purchase? I bet millions of people would go for it.”

Appointment Trader was launched as a place where bookings of all sorts could be bought and sold. However, restaurant reservations quickly became its most popular commodity, with a particular focus on New York City’s fine dining scene, which accounted for about half of its traffic.1

Appointment Trader’s users

In a 2025 interview, Frey said that many of the sellers on his app were “regular diners” who had desirable reservations, changed their minds, and wanted to get something for their bookings instead of just writing them off as missed opportunities.2

However, much of the media attention that Appointment Trader attracted focused on the site’s power users—the professional sellers who earned big bucks on it.

Alex Eisler, for instance, was active on the platform between 2022 and 2024. In addition to his profile in Business Insider, he was covered by NBC News and The New Yorker. He told NBC that while earning the equivalent of a six-figure salary on Appointment Trader wasn’t effortless, it didn’t take anything close to a full-time schedule.

“This semester, I personally have my Tuesdays with nothing—no classes,” he said. “So Tuesdays are kind of like my reservation day.”

A brand-new (and lucrative) side hustle

Frey told us that in 2023, the year that Eisler was most active on the site, he was only its “fifth-biggest seller.” Another person made a staggering $350,000, more than three times as much.

However, Eisler was the most notorious seller the platform saw.

It’s possible his story took off because of his “everyman” quality. After all, during his period of activity, he was still an undergrad, and many of his peers were washing dishes, bussing tables, and doing the other sorts of odd jobs that students do to make ends meet. Meanwhile, he was raking in more than most Americans make at their full-time jobs in a year.

This made his success feel both tantalizingly attainable and frustratingly enviable. As a student, wouldn’t you have liked to earn six figures by haunting an app for a few hours per week? Well, come to think of it, yes.

This appeal—and a genuine consumer appetite for ways to jump the queue and buy spots at hard-to-book restaurants—made Appointment Trader a quick success, both with sellers and buyers. In early 2023, The New York Times profiled Jonas Frey, who told the paper that his platform had facilitated more than $2.4 million in sales. By 2024, that had climbed to $7 million annually.3

Not everyone found something aspirational in the story of Alex Eisler—and not everyone was a fan of Jonas Frey’s new platform.

As early as 2022, just a little over a year after the site’s launch (and before Eisler’s viral success), the San Francisco Chronicle claimed that the then-scruffy operation had “frustrated” its competitors, which included the booking giants Tock and OpenTable.

Both platforms (which, naturally, prefer for diners to book reservations with them rather than buy them on the secondary market) said they were considering taking legal action against the new website.

Initially, all of this was small-time news, the sort of squabbling that disruptive startups get up to all the time, but in 2024, another article published in The New Yorker put Appointment Trader fully on the map, for better or for worse.

The piece was titled “Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation,” and the subtitle declared that “bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers” had “turned the restaurant reservation system inside out.”

Although that article eventually led to his app being banned in much of the country, Frey was matter-of-fact about it when he spoke to us. The article itself, he told us, was fair, and “actually well-researched, almost scientific.”

It also didn’t directly spark much debate. “The article came out, and really, nothing happened, nothing big,” said Frey.

He paused for a moment.

“Then, four weeks later, some guy on X shared a screenshot.”

How a viral screenshot led to a lobbying campaign

Frey told us that the screenshotted excerpt—which included Alex Eisler and the fact that he’d earned over $100,000 on the platform—went viral, garnering 10 million views in several days, “more than the hawk tuah girl.” Controversy followed, which was accompanied by a slew of other articles.

Established booking companies began lobbying more aggressively for Appointment Trader to be banned.

On May 14, less than a month after The New Yorker’s piece dropped, several New York legislators—Assemblymember Alex Bores and State Senator Nathalia Fernandez—introduced Senate Bill S.9365/A.10215, the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act, to prohibit the resale of restaurant reservations.

In December, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, signed the bill into law. It went into effect several months later, at which point Frey’s app was effectively banned in the state of New York.

Industry criticism of Appointment Trader

The Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act’s supporters included Frey’s competitors, such as OpenTable, Tock, and Resy, another major booking website that is owned by American Express.4

It also included the New York State Restaurant Association (NYSRA), a nonprofit that supports the dining and hospitality industry.

These organizations made several claims about apps like Appointment Trader:

• They’re full of bots: Many of the early sellers on Appointment Trader used automated software to snap up as many reservations as possible, something that the app’s critics returned to again and again in their statements to the media. “When consumers have the ability to dine out, they shouldn’t have to contend with malicious software,” Bores told Food & Wine.5
• They lead to no-shows: This was the NYSRA’s central criticism of the platform: that it hurt restaurants. They claimed that many of the reservations that Appointment Trader’s resellers acquired were never actually sold, leading to restaurants full of empty tables, which was a big loss in an industry with famously narrow profit margins.
• They’re bad for consumers: The politicians who endorsed Bill S.9365 often said that reservation reselling made it harder for ordinary families to dine out. “With this legislation, we are ensuring that families can celebrate a graduation, anniversary, or birthday without a $250, $500, or even $1,000 cover charge,” said Bores.6

Jonas Frey’s response

Naturally, Frey rejected these criticisms of his app.

Frey has acknowledged that his platform had a problem with bots in the very beginning, but he told Side Hustles he took steps to cut down on this by penalizing users with low “sell-through rates”—in other words, people who booked very large numbers of reservations and sold only a few of them.

This, he said, prevented the pandemic of no-shows that the NYSRA worried about. It also meant his users had a better experience on the site, which he didn’t want to be choked with thousands of bot-uploaded bookings.

“We don’t want people to upload a thousand reservations,” he said. “We want a guy that genuinely can’t make it to upload a reservation.”

As far as the “ordinary families” rhetoric, Frey noted that the reservations that are bought and sold on Appointment Trader tend to be for extremely high-end establishments, such as Carbone, which Michelin memorably described as a place where “reservations remain scarce and prices sky high.” These are not, he said, places where your average person is likely to book an anniversary meal.

Frustration crept into Frey’s voice when he spoke about Kathy Hochul’s statements to the media after she signed the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act into law.

“In a public interview, she goes, ‘Finally, families can go dining again.’ And I’m like, yeah, yeah, they’re all gonna go to Carbone, all these families that couldn’t go out anymore. It’s just not true. When you read the purpose of the law, it is literally made up.”

Frey suggested there was something suspicious in how fast the legal push against Appointment Trader escalated after the New Yorker piece went viral and Resy and OpenTable issued statements criticizing the app.

“It took three weeks,” he said. “In three weeks, they did all the impact studies—everything, right? … Nine months later, the law was active, and then within six months, there were seven more states and municipalities … now, like 180 million Americans are governed by that law.”

Frey said this was a “big lesson” for him. “I would never in my wildest dreams thought that nationwide legislation could be pushed through that fast.”

To hear him tell it, the Appointment Trader ban was a classic David and Goliath story, and in this one, David lost. Appointment Trader was out-spent and out-lobbied by its larger, more established competitors.

“I spoke to lobbyists when this happened and they said, look, man, we’re happy to take your money, but you’re talking about the New York Restaurant Association and American Express,” he said. “You’re going to need to lobby in every state, and they pay their lobbyists more than you can.”

Competing narratives

In the dispute over reservation reselling, both sides portrayed themselves as being on the side of rank-and-file diners; the common people.

Pablo Rivero, the CEO of Resy, told The New Yorker in 2024 that his platform was meant to “democratize dining,” and it’s true that on Resy (and OpenTable), users don’t pay for reservations. They book them for free.

On the booking site Dorsia, whose founder has referred to Appointment Trader as a “plague on the hospitality industry,” reserving a table costs money, but this is framed as a prepaid “minimum spend” commitment, and all of it eventually goes toward the price of the meal.7

Reservations themselves only have a separate price on secondary market apps like Appointment Trader.

The case for a marketplace approach

Frey, of course, has his own criticisms of platforms like Resy and OpenTable.

He told us—and has claimed in many other interviews—that without apps like his, it’s functionally impossible for most diners to get a reservation at many exclusive spots in cities like New York.

Restaurants often publicly list just a small number of their available tables, he told us. Diners book the others via their personal networks.

In other words, without his app, getting a table comes down to who you know.

On being a “capitalist hippie”

Frey, who described himself to us as a “capitalist hippie,” was unapologetic about the everything’s-for-sale approach he built his app with. He contends that he had a better claim to being a democratizing force in the dining scene because his site opened it up to anyone and everyone—or, at least, to anyone who could pay.

“I like capitalism because it gives an equal chance to everybody to participate,” he said. “You know, I wasn’t a son of some rich guy, I just started working and there was nobody that told me, ‘no, you can’t do this because you didn’t go to Harvard.’”

Not everyone has Frey’s libertarian leanings, but when it comes to the “democratization” rhetoric, he does have a point. There is independent reporting indicating that some trendy and high-end New York restaurants, such as 4 Charles Prime Rib, really do hold back some of their (limited) tables for “regulars.”

Booking website membership tiers

Even on booking websites like Resy, reservations aren’t usually equally available to all.

The New Yorker observed that due to Amex’s acquisition of Resy, “anyone with a fancy Amex card” receives notifications about available slots well in advance of other diners. One of the cards in question, the Centurion, has a ten thousand dollar “initiation fee,” and keeping it open costs a further five thousand dollars per year.

Resy makes no secret of this perk, which is called Global Dining Access. The site boasts that eligible cardholders get “exclusive reservations” and “primetime tables at sought-after restaurants, held just for you”—a far cry from the democratic, egalitarian rhetoric that the company invoked in its dispute with Frey in 2024.

Frey’s proposed compromise: the BOTS Act

When asked whether he would support any regulation of his app or whether he thought a purely laissez-faire approach was best, Frey had a quick answer. Yes, he told us, there was a specific law that he supported amending so that it applied to his app: the BOTS Act.

This legislation—the acronym stands for “Better Online Ticket Sales”—prohibits reselling tickets that were bought with automated software. This, Frey reminded us, was one of the core criticisms leveled at his app in its early days: that it gave free rein to bots.

“The BOTS Act is a federal act, right?” he said. “It preempts all local legislation. The easiest thing in the world would have been to say, okay, we’re going to amend the BOTS Act to cover restaurant reservations. It literally would have solved the problem.”

He claimed that his competitors—and most of the politicians he spoke to—showed no interest in this, preferring to see his app banned outright. Their efforts were successful, and not just in New York. Other states, including New Jersey, Louisiana, and Illinois, have passed similar legislation. So have several cities, such as Philadelphia.8 9

Frey is able to make a fairly compelling case that not all of his competitors’ criticisms of his app were made in good faith.

It’s true that he took steps to ban bots from his platform, even before the backlash, and that much of the rhetoric that found its way into the popular media, particularly the claim that multitudes of ordinary diners were being impacted by his app, was questionable.

The broad strokes of the story he told us about his competitors’ lobbying campaign are also true. On May 22, 2024, Pablo Rivero personally signed an open letter advocating for the passage of Bill A.10215/S.9365. It was cosigned by the operators of a number of prominent New York restaurants. Concurrently, Resy issued a statement that the company “hoped the New York State Legislature” would pass the bill “before adjourning on June 6.”4

Lobbying records

New York state law mandates that all lobbying spending that exceeds an annual threshold of $5,000 must be registered and disclosed. Public records, which can be queried via the New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government, document the activity that led up to the passage of the bill.

One May–June filing, for instance, shows contact between American Express’s Albany-registered law firm and Alex Bores (directly) and Nathalia Fernandez (via her staff) about the passage of A.10215/S.9365. A number of other records show direct lobbying activity from the NYSRA related to the bill.

Neither Resy or the NYSRA responded when Side Hustles asked them about the details of their lobbying efforts, particularly Frey’s characterization of them. Side Hustles also contacted Bores and Fernandez’s offices; neither responded to our request for comment, either.

Weighing the case against Appointment Trader

Although some of Appointment Trader’s critics may have overstated their claims about the site, it’s hard to argue that it never harmed any restaurants in any material way.

In a 2025 Columbia News Service article, for instance, a named source—Marie Cedano, a reservationist for Bungalow, an expensive Manhattan restaurant—recounted “receiving calls from disappointed patrons, demanding to know why reservations not available on Resy were showing up on Appointment Trader.”3

Amy Zhou, executive director of operations at Gracious Hospitality Management, told FOX Business that her company’s Michelin-starred restaurants in New York saw a significant spike in the number of no-shows they saw every night—from 5%–10% to 25%—in 2023, not long after Appointment Trader took off in the city.7

FOX did not independently corroborate this, and it’s possible that claims like this are mistaken or exaggerated, but one fact is unavoidable: at the end of the day, if someone on Appointment Trader snaps up a table specifically for the purpose of selling it, they’re creating a vacancy knowing that the reservation might not sell.

When that happens, it’s a financial hit to businesses, regardless of whether the seller used a bot to make the booking or not.

A culture of secrecy

Even before the Appointment Trader ban, its users tended to act clandestinely. Alex Eisler admitted to The New Yorker that he used fake phone numbers and email addresses when making reservations, and sometimes he even put on “different accents” to book over the phone when he was afraid an establishment might recognize his voice.

Many of the users on the platform know that it’s controversial, which can make them distrustful of outsiders.

Typing the word “banned” into the search tool at the top of the Appointment Trader homepage turns up an old community post—no longer accessible—that reads, “Banned from Resy for selling reservations- Do we have a rat on our hands???”

Whether this side hustle is ethical is a judgment call, but there’s no way around the fact that it isn’t one that everyone feels comfortable doing in the light of day.

After the passage of the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act, Appointment Trader suspended its operations in New York and vowed to fully comply with the law.

If you visit the site today, however, you’ll see plenty of listings in New York City. It is, in fact, still one of the site’s most active markets.

Appointment Trader is able to do this through what amounts to a legal dodge. Because directly purchasing restaurant reservations is now illegal, the app has shifted from being an open marketplace to a facilitator for “concierge services.”

Instead of bidding on tables, diners make what amount to social media posts letting it be known that they’d like a reservation at a particular restaurant.

Appointment Trader’s “concierges” can respond and help them acquire that reservation for a fee. It’s technically never stated that reservations are being “sold,” but in practice, the interactions look a lot like buyer-seller transactions.

With this approach, Frey believes he can stay on the right side of legislation like Bill S.9365. His legal argument hinges on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that online service providers are generally not responsible for content that their users publish. This is the same law that protects Facebook from being held civilly or criminally liable for illegal content its users upload.

“We, Appointment Trader, don’t list anything, we don’t advertise anything, we don’t promote anything, and we don’t sell anything because users are doing that,” Frey said when he announced this new direction. “We are user-generated content.”

It’s unclear whether this tactic will succeed in the long term, and many commentators are skeptical.

Kristian Stout, a director at the International Center for Law & Economics, told the Columbia News Service that “if the state says that they don’t want this kind of business, a Section 230 defense is not going to help with that.”3

The on-platform reaction to the pivot

Frey’s move also hasn’t been without cost for the platform itself.

The first edition of his site was simple to grasp, conceptually. Version two, with its slightly convoluted legal workaround, isn’t as intuitive, something at least one recent poster has complained about.

“Is it just me or is this unuseable?” they wrote. “When I first used AppointmentTrader a couple of years ago, it was very straightforward. Reservations were listed for sale and you either instant bought or bid them. I have no idea where to access that now [or] if that even exists anymore.”

The takeaway is that Appointment Trader has probably been damaged by the attempts to take it down. However, it remains operational, even in the jurisdictions that tried to ban it.

The site is still being used, with its transaction records indicating that on most days, it facilitates the purchase of “concierge services” worth at least several thousand dollars.

Another seller, whose screen name is PerceptiveWash44, was featured in The New Yorker piece that made Alex Eisler famous. The outlet noted that in 2023, that seller “made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations” (as well as that he had “made almost two thousand reservations that never sold—a restaurateur’s nightmare”).

That user is still active. In 2025, according to Appointment Trader’s internal data which appears on a regularly updated “Wall of Fame,” he earned about $88,000 from filling 729 reservations. This meant he was the site’s fourth most successful “concierge,” measured by total dollars earned.

That year, the site’s other top users earned:

• $240,000 (with 1,540 transactions)
• $140,000 (with 1,010 transactions)
• $100,000 (with 774 transactions)
• $41,000 (with 160 transactions)
• $24,000 (with 296 transactions)
• $22,000 (with 100 transactions)
• $12,000 (with 202 transactions)
• $11,000 (with 55 transactions)

These are the nine people who currently earn more than $10,000 on Appointment Trader per year. The site remains fairly active, but most of its users appear to be far more casual.

The group of true professionals on the app is small, and jaw-dropping earnings like Eisler’s are rare.

Appointment Trader’s most famous seller

As for Appointment Trader’s most well-known user, he’s no longer on the app. His last significant activity on it dates from 2024, and his last recorded sign-in was in early 2026.

He did not respond to Side Hustles’ request for comment and has not spoken publicly about the app since the slew of articles that made him famous, although he’s making no effort to hide his former side hustle; his “Top Seller” status features in the “Experience” section on his LinkedIn page.

His LinkedIn also shows that after graduating from Brown, he landed an internship with Goldman Sachs, which turned into a full-time position in 2026.

Equities analysts aren’t known for having the time—or the need—to hold down side hustles, so the odds are good that Eisler’s time on Appointment Trader was always limited.

A small (but persistent) side hustle

Other people are still using Appointment Trader to make a buck, with a very small number earning the equivalent of a full-time income on it.

For people interested in this unusual—and controversial—market, the platform is still accessible.

If, having heard out both Frey and his critics, you’re interested in breaking into this side hustle yourself, it’s still possible to pull down impressive numbers, although it’s unclear whether the site can support another Eisler, or whether, following the legal hits the site has taken, there’s no more room at the top.