Boston diners booking a table this summer might not notice which app they used to snag it, but restaurants across the city are increasingly picking sides in a fight that has little to do with seating charts. Mamma Maria in the North End, O Ya downtown, and the Seaport’s Maple & Ash have all landed on different platforms in a scramble that pits tech and financial giants against a decades-old incumbent, with restaurant operators wrestling over who ultimately owns the data generated by a guest’s reservation.
The fight has been reshaped by a wave of corporate deals. DoorDash bought SevenRooms for $1.2 billion in 2025, folding the guest-management platform into its broader commerce operation, according to The Boston Globe. SevenRooms, founded in New York in 2011, has operated in the Boston market since 2018, and its parent company reports that new restaurants are signing on every week, according to DoorDash executive Parisa Sadrzadeh, as cited in that reporting. Mamma Maria, O Ya, and the Coje Restaurant Group are among the local operators now running on the platform.
American Express, meanwhile, purchased Tock for $400 million in 2024, pairing it with Resy, which the company already owned. Resy now counts 25,000 restaurants in its network, per the platform’s own figures, and it charges restaurants a flat membership fee rather than the per-head charge that has long defined its rival OpenTable. O Ya uses Tock, which allows diners to prepay for their meals, while chef Jennifer Matarazzo has signed with Resy.
OpenTable Digs In Against a Shrinking Share
OpenTable, launched in 1998 and now owned by Booking Holdings following a $2.6 billion acquisition in 2014, remains the largest global online reservation platform, with roughly 65,000 restaurants on its books worldwide, according to the company’s own reporting cited by the Globe. But its grip on the U.S. market has slipped in recent years as newer, operator-friendly rivals have gained ground; industry research tracked by CheckThat.ai found OpenTable’s share of U.S. restaurant reservations fell from 51% to about 31.9% by early 2025.
What Each Platform Actually Does With Guest Information
The tools themselves increasingly double as data engines built for restaurants, not diners. SevenRooms functions as a customer relationship management system, offering detailed diner tagging, personalized guest profiles that can follow a customer across multiple locations of the same restaurant group, plus email automation and online reputation monitoring. In June, the company launched Channel Connect, a feature that consolidates booking data pulled in from other reservation sites directly into the SevenRooms system…