TheFork: American Express completes $700m takeover
The card company has folded TheFork into its dining business, adding more than 55,000 European restaurants to a reservations push that already includes Resy and Tock.
American Express has completed its $700m acquisition of TheFork, folding one of Europe's largest restaurant-booking platforms into a dining network that already spans Resy and Tock.
The deal, agreed in June and confirmed closed this month, hands Amex more than 55,000 partner restaurants across Europe, built up over more than a decade under previous owner Tripadvisor. TheFork users have logged over 50 million app downloads and left more than 25 million verified reviews, according to the company's own figures.
TheFork changes hands at last
Restaurant bookings are becoming a toll road, and the card networks just bought the on-ramps.
Tripadvisor bought TheFork, then trading under its French name La Fourchette, in 2014. The travel-review group put the unit up for sale this year after weighing what it called strategic alternatives for the business. American Express announced the $700m, all-cash purchase on 15 June, subject to labour consultation and regulatory clearance that has since come through.
TheFork keeps its name and its existing management under Amex. Chief executive Almir Ambeskovic said the deal combines the platform's restaurant expertise and technology with Amex's international reach, opening what he called new opportunities for both sides.
Rafa Marquez, president of international card services at American Express, called dining one of the most important ways customers engage with the brand. Tripadvisor Group chief executive Matt Goldberg said he was confident the sale had found TheFork "an ideal home."
Amex builds out its dining stack
The purchase extends a run of restaurant-technology acquisitions for Amex, which bought the US reservations app Resy in 2019 and the restaurant-management platform Tock in 2024. Alongside TheFork, the three platforms are expected to connect tens of thousands of bookable restaurants across Europe and the Americas, at a time when booking itself is shifting toward AI-assisted reservation tools.
For now, Amex says nothing changes at street level. TheFork Manager, the back-office software restaurants use to handle reservations, table turns and the kind of no-show fees now spreading through Germany, continues to run as before, as does the consumer app's real-time availability search.
The harder test comes next: whether a card company can run a European reservations network as well as the travel and technology firms that owned it before.
