AI reservation agents push Resy into a crackdown

AI reservation agents are testing the limits of restaurant booking platforms, after Resy deactivated a venture capitalist's account when his automated assistant made roughly 200 requests an hour trying to land a table at 4 Charles, a hard-to-book New York restaurant.

JC Bahr-de Stefano, a principal at a venture capital firm, had told an AI assistant built by a startup called Instinct to hunt down the reservation on his behalf. The agent obliged, hammering Resy's system around the clock instead of checking in occasionally like a human user would.

Resy's terms of service prohibit unsanctioned bots or autonomous agents from interacting with its booking system, and the platform deactivated Bahr-de Stefano's account and cancelled his pending reservations once the traffic pattern was flagged. He posted about the experience, and the post drew 941,000 views, turning a personal inconvenience into a wider conversation about automated booking.

Restaurants depend on reservation platforms to manage limited seating fairly, and automated traffic can crowd out ordinary diners.

AI reservation agents test the rules

Bahr-de Stefano was not the only user caught out. Reports of AI reservation agents built by Instinct and similar tools triggered a broader response across consumer platforms, with Resy, American Express and Uber all moving to identify and block automated traffic that mimics human browsing while operating at a scale no person could match.

The appeal is obvious: getting a table at the city's most in-demand restaurants often means refreshing an app the moment a cancellation appears, a task well suited to software that never needs to sleep. Industry survey data from SevenRooms found 79 percent of diners were comfortable with AI handling reservations in principle, and the National Restaurant Association's State of the Restaurant Industry 2026 report put AI adoption among operators at 26 percent, mostly in marketing rather than booking.

Platforms weigh access against abuse

Restaurants depend on reservation platforms to manage limited seating fairly, and a flood of automated requests can crowd out ordinary diners or distort waitlists, much as ticket-buying bots have done to concert and sports tickets. Resy has not detailed how it distinguishes a legitimate booking assistant from a disruptive one, beyond barring unauthorised bots outright.

For now, the dispute leaves diners who want AI help booking a table with few sanctioned options, while platforms decide how much automation they are willing to tolerate before it undermines the systems built to keep bookings fair, a question that will only grow more pressing as more hospitality operators lean on technology to offset soft sales.