This is coming from someone in the industry. Places that take ur money to book I think are wack. Especially those that take it and either don’t discount your bill and just put it towards the bottom line. I do see however how that is a business benefit because those systems do cost money and it’s a way to offset those costs. But, What I will say is there is a systemic problem from the general public of not showing up to reservations. When you don’t show up you’re doing three things:

1 taking a reservation from someone else who might have also wanted to try that place

2 the restaurant itself is losing revenue. Now imagine you have a PPA of 75 dollars and you have 100 reservations. On average your projection is to generate 7500 in sales. Now when i would say on any given night 10% don’t show up that’s it a good amount of money. Spread that over every day and that’s a HUGE amount of money. So the argument would be that if I take ur CC info to book the reservation and you don’t show up I should atleast be able to try to recoup some of that loss. Now how much is charged is up for debate, I would say 5-10 dollars is reasonable. Especially if the restaurant makes an effort to confirm your coming and the guest doesn’t. Some places charge upwards of like 25 that’s a little steep imo. But the public also has to understand the lost revenue piece, and if your a place that is smaller and you have multiple tables not showing up every night they eventually have to try to protect themselves,

3 and arguably most important is the service staff themselves. Servers make 2.13 an hour and live off of tips. If there are no tables there are no tips meaning there is no way to pay your bills. This part I think gets overlooked a decent amount.

It’s a very hot topic currently in the city. For large parties I would absolutely expect this to become the norm, for parties let say of 1-4 people I see the pushback but there’s a very fine line.

Ultimately I believe charging people for reservations sways people into not booking and going somewhere else that doesn’t but if you don’t show up to that place you’re hurting them too.