Matt Tucker serves as Head of Tock, the innovative hospitality reservation and table management platform celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2025, which was acquired by American Express last year. Over time, Tock and Resy will merge their platforms to enhance their offerings for a combined network of over 27,000 hospitality businesses and over 50 million registered users.
Tock is celebrating its 10th anniversary. How did the platform get started, and what problem was it trying to solve?
In 2014, Tock’s founder Nick Kokonas, grew frustrated with the limitations of traditional reservation systems while running The Alinea Group. He built Tock to put restaurants first by addressing critical issues like costly no-shows and optimizing revenue, introducing a prepaid reservation model that dramatically reduced no-show rates from 20% to just 1-2%.
Nick’s insight was provocative yet simple: If consumers are willing to pay in advance for concert tickets, why not prepay for an exceptional dining experience? He also introduced surge pricing with the philosophy that “Tuesday is not Saturday” – recognizing that a table at 5 PM on a Tuesday doesn’t have the same value as one on Saturday at 7 PM, so they shouldn’t be priced identically.
How has Tock evolved beyond those early fine-dining roots?
What started as a way to help high-end restaurants reduce no-shows has evolved into a comprehensive platform serving diverse hospitality businesses, from boutique wineries to large hospitality enterprises. Our platform has evolved to handle everything from standard reservations and deposits to prepaid experiences and events.
Through continued innovation, we introduced a first-of-its-kind feature called Multi-Experience Tables. This allows restaurants to list a table on Tock for different uses from à la carte dining to a wine pairing or chef’s tasting. Each experience offers a unique way for a guest to enjoy an evening out, and the restaurant is able to see what resonates with its guests, so they might offer the table for a chef’s tasting first, while also offering a scaled down version for guests who want to spend perhaps a bit less. Multi-Experience Tables give guests the flexibility to choose what experience they want while helping restaurants maximize revenue in their space.
Last year, American Express acquired Tock, bringing you together with Resy. How is that integration progressing?
The acquisition in October 2024 marked a major milestone for us. Under American Express, Tock and Resy will integrate platforms, leveraging our individual strengths to make each other better. Over time, this integration will help businesses drive more revenue and access a broader combined guest network while also providing a better guest experience. Our primary goal to serve operators remains the same and we will combine the best products from Tock and the best products from Resy into a unified, best-in-class hospitality experience.
Tock’s restaurant selection has traditionally skewed toward fine dining, wineries, and hotels, and we’re well-known for technological innovations such as experiences, prepayment, and events, while Resy made its mark with trendy local restaurants and a robust editorial arm leading to significant diner discovery. Together, we account for 50 million registered users and more than 27,000 hospitality businesses, which will all be bookable in one place.
Tell us about the Tock 10 campaign you recently launched.
For our 10th anniversary, we’re highlighting ten exceptional hospitality businesses on our platform with a new theme each month. To start we featured 10 restaurants that took a chance by joining Tock in its early days, including Smyth in Chicago, Lazy Bear in San Francisco, and Spoon and Stable in Minneapolis, among others.
After launching the first collection highlighting our pioneering partners as “The Firsts,” we released our second collection called “What’s in a Name,” which explores identity, philosophy, and ethos through restaurant names. Like a great recipe, a restaurant’s name is carefully crafted, and we’re digging into the unique stories behind these establishments including Atomix in New York, Jook Sing in Chicago, and Masseria in Washington, DC.
How are you marketing differently with the backing of American Express?
For nearly a decade, Tock has grown through a combination of word-of-mouth, organic adoption, and strategic marketing to restaurants.
While reaching hospitality businesses remains important, we’re now more proactive in our outreach to diners. American Express will continue to help Tock amplify our efforts to raise awareness and grow our network across both businesses and guests.
The Tock 10 campaign exemplifies this strategy by highlighting amazing restaurants on Tock to inspire diners and drive bookings, while also showing other restaurants that they’re part of a broader community of standout brands.
The reservations space is getting more competitive. How is Tock responding to these challenges?
The competition is definitely growing. Many POS systems now offer reservations as a standard feature, and customers can also book a table directly on Google. In fact, this past January we expanded our Reserve with Google integration to offer customers the ability to showcase all experiences, both free and prepaid, directly in Google search results. Our job is to be creative and strategic to find ways to drive more covers to our partners.
More discovery-driven content and curation are potential answers to that question, which is one reason why we’re investing in editorial initiatives like Tock 10. At the same time, we’re also focused on staying ahead with our product offerings, which benefit both hospitality businesses and guests.
We’ve also significantly broadened our selection beyond primarily fine-dining restaurants to include local favorites, like Chicago’s Pequod’s Pizza. This continued expansion helps us serve a more diverse range of establishments while maintaining our commitment to innovation and putting our hospitality partners first.
What trends are you seeing in the restaurant industry that are influencing your product development?
We’re seeing restaurants become much more strategic about filling every seat. With rising costs and shifting consumer behaviors, our data shows that personalized marketing based on guest preferences drives significantly higher conversion rates.
That’s where our latest feature, Notify, becomes a true differentiator. Notify gives restaurants a powerful tool to fill every seat by instantly re-engaging with guests on the waitlist when a table becomes available. Rather than leaving canceled reservations unsold, Notify enables restaurants to seamlessly reconnect with high-intent diners, turning a potential loss into a full table. This not only helps maximize occupancy, but also builds loyalty through a sense of thoughtful, responsive hospitality.
Additionally, sophisticated restaurants are beginning to leverage data more effectively to forecast demand, offer personalized hospitality, and make more informed decisions. One of the defining attributes of fine-dining establishments is offering superior, tailored hospitality to their guests. We’re working to empower smaller establishments and neighborhood spots to offer similarly tailored guest experiences.
We’re also seeing a return to experiential dining where guests seek unique, memorable moments. That’s why features like our Multi-Experience Tables have been so successful – they allow restaurants to market the same tables in different, premium ways based on the diner’s preference while also maximizing revenue. More specifically, our track record demonstrates our value—partners generate 30% higher check averages from experiences than ordinary reservations1 and increase revenue by 15% using our Multi Experience Table feature2.
What is your vision for the future of Tock and restaurant technology?
While Tock is celebrating its 10th anniversary, American Express is turning 175, and has a wealth of experiences and resources globally to share with us as we grow together. Specifically, in the next decade, we see Tock becoming a cornerstone of American Express’ Global Dining ecosystem. As we move towards a full and unified integration with Resy, our mission is to continue helping restaurants adapt to the ever-changing needs of the industry. I envision a future where dining experiences are more personalized, more accessible, and more profitable for restaurants. With the combined strengths of Tock and Resy, we’re well positioned to help shape the future of hospitality and ensure our partners thrive.
- Tock proprietary data from January 1, 2023 to July 26, 2024 which includes customers who have a POS integration configured with Tock and have at least 50 booked covers in each Booking Type category in the time period above; Ordinary reservation means free reservation or other types of non-experience reservations.
- Tock proprietary data reviewed from MXT Beta launch in November 2023 to end of June 2024 to capture full 30 days pre- and post- MXT inventory schedule; Data is filtered to only customers who have had MXT tables included in their available business inventory in the time period above.
