How to Tell Which Reservation System a Restaurant Uses

Three tests answer this, and the first one answers it most of the time. Open the restaurant's own website, press Reserve or Book a Table, and read the address bar. A marketplace takes over the whole page and puts its own domain in front of you. A venue-run system keeps you on the restaurant's domain, inside a form wearing the restaurant's own colors. If the address does not settle the question, the booking form itself and then the confirmation email will.

Knowing the answer is not trivia. It decides where you look for availability, when tables get released, whether a waitlist exists, what a cancellation costs, and whether any watching tool can see the room at all. Last verified 24 September 2026.

Why is the system hidden in the first place?

Two of the big systems want to be seen and one does not. Resy and OpenTable are marketplaces: they aggregate demand into an app, so their branding is the product and they put it everywhere. SevenRooms sells restaurants the opposite promise — it is the software behind the house's own book, deliberately white-labeled, so the guest relationship stays with the venue. That is precisely why diners cannot identify it. You can book three SevenRooms restaurants in a month, see a different logo each time, and never once encounter the word SevenRooms. The rooms that choose it skew toward places with more demand than seats, which is how a restaurant ends up looking permanently unavailable to someone who only ever searches one app.

The URL test: what each system puts in the address bar

Press the restaurant's Reserve button and check where you land. This table is the whole diagnostic in one place, including the honest column about what a watcher can reach.

The widget test: reading the booking form itself

Sometimes a marketplace is embedded rather than linked, so the domain never changes. Read the form instead. If it asks you to sign in or create an account before you can hold a time, you are on a marketplace, because the account is how Resy and OpenTable keep you. If it takes a name, email, phone and often a card, confirms immediately and never mentions an account, you are almost certainly on SevenRooms. If the flow reads like buying a ticket — a price per person, a checkout, a total — that is Tock's prepaid model rather than a held table. And if the form says someone will get back to you, it is a request, not a reservation, and no availability feed exists for it at all.

The confirmation-email test

The email is the most reliable tell of the three, because the sender cannot be styled away. A Resy booking confirms from Resy with a link into your Resy account. An OpenTable booking confirms from OpenTable and shows up in your reservation list there. A SevenRooms booking confirms from the restaurant, and the manage or cancel link inside it is the only handle you have on that reservation — there is no central app to open, which is covered in how SevenRooms works. Losing that email does not lose you the table, but it does lose you the self-serve path, and the fix is calling the restaurant.

What if none of the tests match?

Then the room is running something outside the big three, and it is worth naming those cases plainly rather than pretending everything is coverable. ResDiary and Tablecheck are common in the UK, Europe and Japan. Plenty of restaurants run a native form on their own site, and plenty more are phone-only by choice. Private dining rooms and buyouts are almost never platform inventory anywhere — they are phone and email, handled by an events manager. In all of those cases the winning tactic is the unglamorous one: call during a quiet hour, be specific about date, time and party size, and ask to be told if something opens. Our venue guides, indexed by city from the hardest restaurants to book in NYC onward, state the system each room runs on, so you can check a specific restaurant instead of guessing — the pages for Carbone and 4 Charles Prime Rib, both on Resy, are typical.

One system is currently moving

Tock is the live exception to any answer you memorize. Amex is retiring the Tock consumer app and site and moved Tock's restaurants onto Resy on 11 August 2026, so a venue that opened exploretock.com last season may open resy.com this one. Re-run the URL test rather than trusting your memory; the handover and what it means for an existing booking are in what happens to Tock reservations.

Why the answer decides what software can help

SeatSwiper watches Resy, SevenRooms and OpenTable, and that list is a hard boundary rather than a roadmap: a Tock ticket, a ResDiary form, a native request page or a phone-only room is out of reach, and saying so is more useful than a vague promise. When the room is on one of the three, you name the restaurant, date, time and party size once, and it holds the watch until a seat opens or someone cancels, then books on your own account in your own name. Pricing, stated whole: the first booking is free, then a flat $5 charged only when a booking succeeds, and no subscription — but a cancellation watch costs $1 to start, taken when the watch begins even if nothing ever opens, and the free first booking does not cover that $1. It can also lose a race for a single seat. Identify the system first; that one check tells you whether any of this applies. Details in how SeatSwiper works.