Recently American Express announced a new relationship with RESY, a dining reservations program. The program is similar to (and competing with) the Open Table program. Both programs allow you to look up restaurants in an area, make dining reservations and earn points.
With this new partnership, when you pay with your American Express, you can also earn Membership Rewards points on the spend associated with your reservation. As an introduction, American Express is also offering a promotion where you can earn 500 bonus points per completed reservation (up to 3 times) between 8/15/19 and 9/30/19. In order to claim these points, you must add your American Express to your RESY payment wallet before completing your dining experience.
I didn’t want to miss this new opportunity to earn some big Membership Rewards bonus points. I was all set to get on board the RESY train, but as is my nature, I wanted to do a little research first. I checked out the RESY website (before downloading an app that I may or may not use) only to find that it determined my location and automatically set my area of choice to Detroit. Detroit is over an hour away and we very rarely eat there. As I explored the site, I found there is a drop down menu that allows you to change your location. But there are only 22 large cities listed for you to choose from. Detroit is the only location in Michigan.
I tried typing other cities where we DO dine in into the search bar. I got 2 or 3 hits when I put in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids but nothing for Traverse City. Traverse is a foodie mecca in Michigan and we visit there often. I find it really surprising that there isn’t one option there. So I think to myself, Ok this won’t work for me locally but what about for other places we will be traveling to this year. I punched in Waikiki and only got 2 selections and 3 choices in Dallas. It seems the search is more designed toward finding a particular restaurant than it is looking them up by city. I was quickly frustrated and a little annoyed.
With the Open Table reservation program, you can search in a number of ways and can easily select any city you want to search in. There are locations all over my state (not just Detroit) and even a couple that are in my town. I hope that Resy takes this affiliation with American Express as an opportunity to expand it’s program beyond the 22 large cities listed on their site. I also hope that they make adjustments that make the program more user friendly and fine tune the search options fields to give you more opportunities to find a dining match.
My Thoughts….
I was really looking forward to utilizing this program because of the new relationship between Amex and RESY. I am truly disappointed that it doesn’t look like a very promising option for me. I am sure this program will be great for all the people who live in or close by the 22 big cities listed on their website. But as for everyone else and this small town midwestern girl, not so much.
Am I being to quick to dismiss this program? Does anyone have any additional tips, tricks or positive experience with the program that you would like to share? I would love to hear it if you do! Leave Feedback!
The World According to Dev 