OpenTable's System of Record Mandate Is the Opening Shot in a Three-Way War for Your Guests

On April 16, 2026, OpenTable's new terms of service go into effect. Under the updated policy, restaurants that use the platform must designate OpenTable as their "system of record" for reservations, table management, and guest data. All available inventory must be listed on the OpenTable marketplace. The policy does not prohibit using other platforms, but it requires OpenTable to serve as the central hub for everything.

For many operators, that distinction will feel academic. It is not.

What the Mandate Actually Requires

OpenTable's official justification, as reported by Restaurant Business Online on March 24, 2026, is protecting restaurant data from "bad actors" and "unauthorized parties." The language is carefully chosen to sound protective. Operators should read it more carefully.

Designating any single platform as your system of record means that platform holds the authoritative copy of your guest data. Guest history, preferences, spend patterns, visit frequency: all of it flows through and resides in a system you do not own, governed by terms you did not write, controlled by a company whose business interests may diverge sharply from yours.

Byron Puck, president of Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group, put it plainly in response to the mandate: "By forcing that restaurant to have you as a system of record, it really debilitates the restaurant's ability to perform at its highest level in the market."

Rebecca Levine-Hough, vice president at Altamarea Group, went further, telling Restaurant Business Online that compliance would require "reworking our entire back-end reservation system" including reprogramming and staff retraining. For a multi-concept group managing high-volume fine dining, that is not a minor update.

This is not the first time OpenTable has used its market position to constrain how operators interact with their own data. In 2019, the company blocked data sharing with competitors before reversing course under industry pressure. The 2026 mandate is a more formalized version of the same play.

The Three Platforms Competing for Your Guest Data

OpenTable's move does not happen in a vacuum. It is a direct response to a market that is rapidly consolidating around three players, each with a different strategy for capturing the same asset: the ongoing relationship between restaurants and their guests.

OpenTable (Booking Holdings)

OpenTable operates across 60,000 restaurants globally and holds a 32.46% share of the reservation software market, according to data from Datanyze and 6sense. At that scale, the platform's position as an industry default is not accidental. Booking Holdings, the parent company, has built a travel and hospitality infrastructure business on the back of similar lock-in dynamics across hotels and flights. The "system of record" language is the same playbook applied to dining.

The mandate ensures that even operators using competing tools must route their canonical guest records through OpenTable, which keeps the platform indispensable regardless of how competition shifts around it.

Resy and Tock (American Express)

On February 24, 2026, American Express announced that Resy and Tock would merge into a single platform. The combined entity serves more than 25,000 venues. AmEx acquired Resy in 2019, Tock in 2024, and Rooam (a payments middleware company) as part of the same consolidation push.

The strategic logic is straightforward. AmEx cardholders spend significantly more on dining than average consumers. A reservation and table management platform owned by AmEx can close the loop between cardholder spending data and restaurant guest data in ways that benefit both the company's credit card business and its restaurant partners.

Under the merger, Tock's consumer app and website are going dark. Restaurant management software will continue under the Resy brand. Operators currently on Tock will need to migrate.

DoorDash and SevenRooms

DoorDash closed its $1.2 billion cash acquisition of SevenRooms in June 2025. SevenRooms is a CRM and guest experience platform built specifically for hospitality operators, used by hotels, restaurants, and large venue groups.

The acquisition gives DoorDash something none of its delivery competitors have: a single data layer that spans delivery orders and dine-in visits. Operators who use SevenRooms for table management and DoorDash for delivery give the company a complete picture of their customers, every channel, every visit, every dollar spent.

DoorDash is already using this to push consumers toward reservations. The company offers DashPass members (20 million subscribers as of the most recent investor disclosures) credits of $10 to $12 for restaurant reservations made through its platform. An internal figure reported by DoorDash shows that 80% of users who tried the "going out" feature subsequently visited a restaurant they had never ordered delivery from before. That is new foot traffic, generated by delivery infrastructure, tracked through an acquired CRM.

For DoorDash, SevenRooms is not a table management product. It is the bridge between delivery and dine-in, the mechanism for turning delivery customers into loyal regulars, and the data asset that makes both sides of that equation legible.

Why This Matters Beyond Fine Dining

The reservation wars are playing out most visibly in white-tablecloth restaurants. But the structural issue runs directly through every segment of the industry, including fast casual and QSR-adjacent concepts that are increasingly relying on technology platforms to manage guest relationships.

Sweetgreen, CAVA, and Shake Shack have all built waitlist and party management tools into their operations. As fast casual concepts add drive-thru lanes, mobile order pickup windows, and catering programs, they accumulate guest data across multiple channels. Each of those touchpoints is a potential dependency on a third-party platform.

The DoorDash angle is the most direct bridge to QSR. Delivery already represents a meaningful share of revenue at most major chains, and every delivery transaction routes through a platform that holds the customer record. When DoorDash integrates SevenRooms, that platform gain extends from delivery into dine-in, reservations, and loyalty. Operators who are comfortable ceding delivery data to DoorDash because "those are DoorDash customers anyway" may be less comfortable with the same logic applied to their dine-in regulars.

The Dependency Problem in Plain Terms

Here is the economic structure that should concern every operator, regardless of segment.

When a platform holds your guest data, it has leverage over your customer relationships. That leverage increases over time: the longer you use the platform, the more complete the data set, and the harder it becomes to migrate without losing relationship continuity. The platform can use that leverage to raise prices, change terms, or compete directly with you by selling access to your guests to other restaurants. OpenTable's marketplace function already does this, surfacing competing restaurants to guests who search by neighborhood or cuisine.

The "system of record" language formalizes what was previously an informal dependency. It makes explicit that the data authority belongs to the platform.

The 2019 episode, when OpenTable blocked competitor access to data before reversing under pressure, previewed exactly how this leverage gets exercised. The April 2026 mandate is the version that does not reverse.

What Operators Should Evaluate Now

The April 16 deadline is specific. Operators using OpenTable for table management have time to respond, but not much.

Several questions are worth working through now:

What data do you actually own? Pull a copy of your guest records from your current platform. Understand what lives there, what format it is in, and what your contractual rights are to export it. This is true regardless of which platform you use.

What does the mandate require you to change operationally? For some operators, designating OpenTable as the system of record is a policy change. For others, like Altamarea Group, it requires back-end reprogramming. The operational cost of compliance is real and should be calculated.

What alternatives exist for your concept? The Resy-Tock merger creates a better-capitalized competitor. SevenRooms, now inside DoorDash, has meaningful hospitality CRM features. Toast and other POS-native solutions are adding reservation management. The market is not static.

What is the cost of switching versus staying? This is the harder calculation. Data migration, staff retraining, and customer-facing disruption all carry real costs. But so does a vendor relationship in which the vendor holds your guest records under terms that can change with 30 days' notice.

The restaurants that will be best positioned when this consolidation settles are the ones that treated guest data as a first-party strategic asset before a platform forced them to think about it. For operators still managing guest relationships primarily through third-party systems, April 16 is an instructive deadline even if you never use OpenTable.

Platform dependency does not announce itself. It accumulates.

Sources: Restaurant Business Online (March 24, 2026); American Express Newsroom (February 24, 2026); DoorDash Investor Relations; Datanyze/6sense market share data.