Sunday, March 2, 2025 | 2 a.m.
If customers can’t get a reservation at the Las Vegas Strip’s most exclusive restaurants, they’ve traditionally only had one other option: knowing “a guy,” whether that be someone who works at the restaurant or a bigwig.
AppointmentTrader.com tried to change that — but it comes at a price. Users can pay for reservations resold on the website by other accounts or place a bounty for a person or bot to claim a reservation for them largely without the restaurant’s knowledge.
That system has its problems, however. New York state’s restaurant association said it led to a higher “no-show” rate. In Las Vegas, the co-owner of Golden Steer Steakhouse told the Sun the same.
Late last year, New York became the first state to ban third-party reservation trading without the restaurant’s express permission, and Nevada may soon follow. The Nevada Senate’s Commerce Committee has scheduled its first hearing on legislation to get it done Monday.
“This is an example of scalping,” said Fabian Doñate, D-Las Vegas, one of the bill’s sponsors. “We see the same thing with ticket prices, where there are third parties that try to take advantage of the consumer, and in this case, they take advantage of the small business.”
The idea behind the website came to Jonas Frey while visiting a Las Vegas-area DMV location four years ago.
Frey, who now lives in Miami, walked in one morning trying to be an “early bird” and was met by a line of around 150 people in front of him. Thinking it was a one-off occurrence, he returned the next day to a similar line.
The fact that there was no efficient market around getting appointments stuck with him for months, and he turned it into a business plan once the venture he was working on at that point went broke.
DMV appointments didn’t make for a great business model, however, as people only go once every few years. But when he gave his audience the ability to search for any location, they kept landing on restaurants.
It’s become a big business, with over $7 million in trades made on the platform over the past year, according to the website. Frey’s team gets 20% to 30% of each trade.
As for Doñate’s claim that the website was a new form of scalping, Frey said it was just capitalism at work. He asked what the difference was between his website and a retailer selling eggs for $2 when they bought a massive amount at $1 each.
In Las Vegas, the website is largely used for restaurants on the Strip such as Carbone at the Aria, which has had 611 user trades in the past 90 days. As of Thursday, reservations for a table for four at the restaurant on March 9 goes for $125.
Golden Steer Steakhouse has been one of the most popular Las Vegas locations, with the website suggesting a minimum bid of $80 to solicit help from the platform’s users to get a reservation Wednesday.
Steakhouse co-CEO Nick McMillan first learned about the world of third-party reselling a few years ago, after an employee alerted him that reservations for his restaurant were being sold online. He wasn’t asked or notified, saying it “just kind of popped up one day.”
McMillan said the site “drives up” the number of people bailing on reservations, oftentimes at the last minute. Last fall, the restaurant discovered that one person, likely a reseller, took 35 to 55 reservations over five weeks.
He said that’s “very disruptive” for his staff who play a complicated game of Tetris each night, fitting as many customers as possible into the steakhouse. When there are so many reservations “off the books,” that process is much more difficult, McMillan said.
The reselling process also jams the normal modes of communication between a restaurant and the customer, he said. Guests can miss key information, such as the steakhouse’s enforced dress code, and confirmation texts can go to the wrong person.
There are guardrails on Appointment Trader to reduce no-shows though, Frey said.
The website also has a tiered system limiting the number of reservations one person can sell. To move to the second level, five of a user’s first 10 reservations uploaded must be sold, Frey said. Like eBay, sellers also have ratings.
“Our top sellers that sold 1,000 reservations or 2,000 reservations, they often have sell-through rates from 70 to 80%,” he said, similar to the industry average.
Frey praised his less than 1% no-show rate for sold listings, though restaurants don’t see a difference between an unsold listing and a sold one that goes unattended. They’re both empty seats that were supposed to be filled.
He also made clear that his clientele is not made up of incredibly wealthy people. He gave an example of a woman in Las Vegas who wrote to the company thanking them for the reservation she secured at Delilah at the Wynn.
Her husband, a firefighter, got a promotion and she wanted to take him on a dinner date, Frey said, and her neighbors kept asking afterward how they possibly got the reservation.
“That is our bread and butter. It’s not rich people because rich people don’t need Appointment Trader. They go to dinner so much that they know (someone),” he said. “They always get seated. It’s the people who don’t do that on a regular basis that use us.”
Speaking to Frey’s criticisms about accessibility, McMillan said every restaurant was different but that his team devoted a “tremendous” amount of time and resources to taking people’s calls and connecting with them online.
“At the end of the day, we want to accommodate as many people as we possibly can,” he said. “All of that gets disrupted with this system, and I know that the other restaurants both on and off the Strip that folks love to go to invest similar time.”
While Las Vegas restaurant owners and the Nevada Restaurant Association may not like the system Appointment Trader and websites like it has created, the call is sometimes coming from inside the house.
Frey said concierges in the city will use relationships with restaurants to carry out the bounties listed on AppointmentTrader.com.
The platform isn’t shy about the business model. To catch the attention of concierges, the website has suggested bids higher than the ones meant to be fulfilled by regular users and bots.
For Golden Steer, the recommendation jumps from $80 to $120 for a reservation this Wednesday.
“Not checked in to one of the grand hotels in Las Vegas? No problem!” the website reads. “Some of the finest concierges are watching for bids at Golden Steer … and are going to leverage their industry connections to set up the time you want.”
Doñate said he didn’t expect much resistance to his legislation, which is co-sponsored by state Sen. Carrie Ann Buck, R-Henderson.
The bill includes a $1,000-a-day penalty for hosting a restaurant without its owner’s permission, the same penalty in New York’s law.
Both versions empower the attorney general to enforce the law, but New York’s, which went into effect Feb. 17, allows private litigation.
Peter Saba, senior government affairs manager at the Nevada Restaurant Association, brought the bill to Nevada after hearing about New York’s efforts. He told the Sun that the organization was considering putting forward an amendment to also enable private lawsuits.
“New York was experiencing the same issue and they got wide bipartisan support because everyone believes the same thing: that these restaurant owners have worked so hard to build the brand that they have and (websites) shouldn’t be taking advantage of it,” Doñate said.
McMillan said he’s supportive of the legislation, but he wasn’t necessarily opposed to working with websites like Appointment Trader in the future. He just wants to know about it first.
Frey’s website has a partnership program for restaurants, giving them half of the company’s fees collected for the location.
“If there is a market need for these things then let’s do it, but let’s do it in a way that’s official and that the restaurant has a say in and control over,” McMillan said, “because ultimately it’s the restaurant’s product that’s being sold.”