Resy
Reviews and Complaints

Cons:
1. Searching for restaurants in a different location is not intuitive and requires several taps in different parts of the screen. This should be a logical flow.
2. Worse, the app usually forces the location back to your home location, so that it’s actually impossible to search in a different location. The full web version is typically required
3. You are forced to scroll through tons of restaurants that do not have availability to find ones that do.
4. The app ignores the time period you search for and instead shows you whatever slots are available, say for lunch when you need a prime dinner reservation
5. Reviews are worthless since every restaurant is 4.5-5 star

Pros:
1. Simpler interface compared to Open Table, which has annoying groups and requires vertical and horizontal scrolling.
2. Added bonuses for Amex members.
3. Restaurants are better curated than Open Table. Resy has more local favorites while Open Table tends to have more tourist traps and chains

The title: “Not as many restaurants, not as simple as Open Table” is just the beginning of why this app is annoying.

There’s also no browser interface (you have to download the app) and there is no tablet app, just a phone app with a tiny map and controls.

Resy MUST be activated using a cell phone number, so they have your mobile number + email.

Finally, the map is tiny, the restaurant search only useful for restaurants nearby, and the actual “select time” feature is bizarre in two ways.

You get a selection of four buttons: “Lunch Early Prime Late”. Because we wanted dinner reservations ... it took a moment to figure out that “Early Prime Late” was for dinner, not lunch. Picking one of these gets a predefined time window. We wanted reservations for 630pm, right after my wife gets home for work. Reservations before 7pm are “early.” Who knew? I don’t even want to ask what “late” means to the app developers.

I have no idea why restaurants would use this. Maybe it’s cheaper than OpenTable. I will ask tonight.

I am an avid yelper and make restaurant reservations several times a week using a plethora of apps, and Resy has BY FAR the worst user experience of all. Honestly I still don’t really know how to use this app AND I DESIGN APPS AND SOFTWARE FOR A LIVING (facepalm).

Pros:
- Resy has some of the hottest restaurants in its roster
- The app is visually pretty
- I like the “alert” me if there’s a seat feature

Cons:
SUPER hard to navigate this app - for example, from the landing page I might type in the restaurant I’m interested in making a reservation for in the search bar, but after clicking into that restaurant it tells me there are no seats available. Great - maybe I want to change the number of people and date for the reservation. BUT HOW? The restaurant’s page doesn’t show me options to change the date + number of seats desired. If I want to change the date / seats, I need to hit BACK, change it on the main page, and then fingers crossed the restaurant has slots.

This might be a bug, but it’s a super annoying one. Plz fix

Resy looks cool but in reality there’s nothing much behind the curtain. Open Table is so much more user oriented. Resy, it seems, is more restaurant oriented. For example, Resy asks you for reviews but doesn’t allow customers to actually read the reviews, so what’s the point? Only the restaurant can read them. As a customer, we only get to see the aggregate rating which we all know can be manipulated. Plus, I like to be able to read reviews and decide for myself. Another pet peeve is that you can’t read a menu. Instead you have to go to the restaurant’s website, read it there, then go back to the app to make the reservation. Time consuming and annoying. Open Table’s app is far superior in many ways but unfortunately Resy is cheaper for the restaurants (so I’ve been told by restaurants when asked why they choose to use it). Yelp too, leaves a lot to be desired, and you expect that from Yelp, but even it works better than Resy. Would love to have this app actually put some functionality into it, otherwise it really is kind of lame.

This app... I hate it. I miss when restaurants used OpenTable, but it seems Resy has come in and paid off everyone in our city to use their app.

Why can’t I just scroll through restaurants reservation times while also seeing the name of the restaurant?
Also, why do I have to guess what “early” vs “prime” dinner time reservations mean? (I mean, I’m not an idiot. I know what it means, but you should still have the actual times in parentheses).
Where are the filters for narrowing down restaurants?
No menu previews.
Why is everything in black? It looks like it’s still in beta mode, and everyone who has ever done any research on font/colors knows that black text on a white background is the evergreen eye-pleasing look that nearly every human appreciates, consciously or not.

Whoever designed this app did not test it very well (or at all?). I despise this app. No rewards. No points. Not user friendly. So many flaws and yet we are forced to use it. It makes me want to just go to a restaurant and wait instead of making a reservation.

I’ve used the app for years and never had a problem. This past week I made reservations at a restaurant in Asbury Park, NJ for Saturday night while a friend was in town. When we got there, there was a private party. I showed the restaurant my reservation but they didn’t know how it happened.

A few minutes later I saw a missed call from a restaurant with the same name in Cambridge, MA. It was at this point I realized the reservation was made at the wrong restaurant. All the texts I received just had the name, no location so I never new. At this point it was too late to cancel my reservation at the wrong restaurant several hundred miles away and I was charged $75! So not only did we not get the dining experience I was expected, I was charged a huge fee for not showing up to a restaurant I didn’t know I had a reservation for.

I’ve noticed the location functionality has been acting buggy the last few weeks, I recommend you call any restaurant you want to make a reservation with and NOT use this app. $75 is a lot of money to be charged for a meal I didn’t eat.

If there aren’t that many restaurants which could only be reserved through Resy, I would delete the apple for good. It is the most frustrating and inefficient reservation app I have been using, ever! I agree with some other people that I’d give the app zero star if apple offered this option for me.
The app doesn’t show the restaurant if you happen to enter the unavailable date. So you have to try dates one by one until the app finally shows the restaurant!
And the app is working so slow. It is too slow that I always wonder whether there is something wrong with my internet.
The even more painful thing is that the calendar for every individual restaurant is useless. You need to go into each date to check the actual availability. There is no way that you could see whether a specific date has availability, or is fully booked, or the restaurant is just closed for that day.
This is my very first review for App Store. Because the most painful thing is I cannot get rid of this app. I have to stay with it as far as I could see...
Please improve the user experience! Please!

Look, people have the Resy app because the restaurant they want to go to is on Resy. Fine. It’s easy enough to make a reservation.

For discovery purposes, though, this is a dud. It’s 2021 and apparently no one at Resy Inc. has heard of filters.

For example: we are in the midst of a pandemic and many people prefer to only dine outside. Heck, even before the pandemic I enjoyed dining outdoors. Now, imagine this: you want to have dinner on a Thursday night, so you open up an app, pull up Thursday, pinch in the time you’d like to eat, and then... you check a box that says “outdoor seating” and it ONLY shows you results with outdoor seating.

Wouldn’t that be amazing! Well, it’s not a fantasy. You can actually do this... in every other reservation app. OpenTable figured this or years ago, guys.

It doesn’t have to just be outdoor dining. Think of all the other filters you could add. Bar seating... gender-neutral restrooms... price point... cuisine... tasting menus... you could select more than one, even, and narrow down your choices... find something new!

FILTERS ARE MAGIC!

The “Notify” feature is awesome and I was happy to find that I was automatically booked - didn’t have to worry about missing the notification.

But then I needed to reduce the number of people (no option for that in the “Change” option, only allows you to change date or time.) Then I went to call the restaurant to tell them, there’s no “call” button or prominent phone number. Then I clicked on the picture/name of the restaurant in my reservation and it only showed me options to invite guests or navigate to it. Then I went to my favorites to click on the restaurant there but there are no hyperlinks, just a list of the names of the restaurants and the option to “Un-favorite” (what good is that?) I then went to the app home to search for the restaurant name and click on that. Buried in the restaurant description is the phone number, but the text is rendered such that my iPhone doesn’t recognize it either as a phone number to call, OR EVEN TEXT THAT I CAN COPY. I had to find a piece of paper to write it down. What a crappy app! Writing this all out I’m going back and taking off another star.

TLDR: there’s no email verification process. If you mistype your email then someone else gets access to your data… I’ve never used this app. But another user signed up and accidentally used my email address. I found out because I started getting calendar notifications for reservations that we’re getting to my gmail account. I wanted to try to fix this. I was able to reset the password on the account. I went to the profile page to cancel the account but was unable to. Apparently you have to delete your account from the app itself which I didn’t have. I emailed support and they told me I needed the phone number in the account in order to delete it. Luckily I have the original user’s name and phone number since I was able to reset their password. If I was malicious I could create or delete reservations for this user and the cancellation fees would apply to their credit cards. I know this is a bit of an edge case but I’m not a hacker and I shouldn’t have been able to get this user’s personal information just because they mistyped an email address. There should have been a verification process for the email. That failure gave me access to this users information.

This app is borderline appalling:

(1) It thinks I live in Quebec, despite repeated attempts to change my home location (Upstate NY, if you couldn’t guess);
(2) it allowed me to verify my login email, but persists in showing an old Gmail account that I never use and an alternative work address from 11 years ago(!), both apparently because it only knows to look at Apple Mail, despite having my iPhone set to default to FastMail; and
(3) it has my correct phone number, but jumps back to the home screen when I press Verify.

There is sooo much more, but I’m not willing to waste more time on an app that Resy seems not to care about given the unanimity of recent reviews on the App Store. Mine would be -5 stars if only that were possible.

Oh, and as a longtime AmEx Card holder, SHAME ON YOU, American Express. Shame. This severely tarnishes your otherwise excellent standing. Did I say, “Shame on you”? Why yes I did.

There is good news though — if you dither long enough, there will probably be a lot of out-of-work devs from Southwest Airlines that you could hire to fix the app. They would surely be at least as well-qualified as those you have now from Clowns ‘r Us.

At launch of the app and EVERY TIME you start a new search, there is at least a 30 second “reload” time. If there weren’t amazing restaurants using your service, I would give up. But at some point, the user experience is going to win... I have reloaded the app, tried turning off location services, etc. Nothing works. Also, seems to have gotten much slower over the past ~ 60 days.

Also, other people have mentioned this too, the app doesn’t always tell you if you’ve reached the max # of days a restaurant books. The calendar feature showing availability when booking direct from a restaurant, while on your computer, is much more user friendly in that way. Similar to how a restaurant just doesn’t show up if you selected a date beyond when that restaurant accepts reservations.

does you UI or QA team login and test the app like a user would use it? I’ve read a lot of your responses to negative reviews / the feedback above and it doesn’t seem like it.

P.S. LOVE the notify feature and it used to work for me. But now with the slowness, I just watch the dial spinning and know that someone is getting that reso (by sheer luck that their slow app might be slightly faster than mine...)

The app is okay but lacking in the following areas:
- integrate restaurant menus to increase efficiency. Browsing via the app is useless b/c you have to go outside the app to understand what type of food and pricing you’re looking at.

- change search time. You can only search by meal time (ie - breakfast, lunch, prime, late, etc). What’s the definition of these time frames? Late isn’t universal and therefore you might be searching for the wrong time and have restaurants excluded. Stop trying to be clever (or different than opentable) and just add the ability to search by exact time.

- add a points/reward system. This app will always be a last option for me b/c there’s no incentive to using it.

- reviews. There are stars associated with each restaurant but no access to actual reviews or number of reviews listed. This is futile b/c the review helps you understand why someone rated the restaurant a certain way. Number of reviews helps b/c if 5 stars is based on one reviews it’s meaningless.

Pros:
- the map feature is nicely laid out shows the results below
- notify feature is helpful if you really want to go somewhere that’s booked
- display of search results is simple and nice

I dislike the the design of this app. And since it’s required for many of my favorite places to eat, being forced to use something this annoying only makes it worse.

Let’s be real, everyone uses the app and not the actual website for this kind of thing so the app needs to work. I don’t want to be directed to use the website instead. Seriously, what?!

The app is often unresponsive and buggy. This seems to happen when there isn’t a prefect internet connection. Things spin and don’t load. And the app doesn’t tell you any of this, but instead makes you think your reservations have all disappeared. If it’s not loading properly, at least have the app tell you there is a connection problem instead of appearing like things are working and missing.

The way you search for reservations seems completely unintuitive to me. You often aren’t making reservations the day of, so why is this the default criteria? This app is like it was created for people traveling who haven’t planned anything out. Have a make new reservation button!

Why can’t I quickly get to my reservations or my favorite restaurants from the main page?

Why doesn’t it show the restaurant photo when I send an invite and share the reservation with people via text?

I can’t believe something so flawed has worked its way in to becoming so integral to the restaurant world.

To be clear, I only use the Resy app because I have to.

Resy, just make the app better and enjoyable to use!

Resy has a great assortment of restaurants on its platform, with many top and/or popular choices as well as ones that are newly trending. But the app itself is notoriously frustrating to use. Ability to get on a wait list and be notified is probably the only plus it offers. Otherwise good luck trying to filter! Even something simple as a neighborhood filter doesn’t exist and the interactive map to do this is 10% effective at best. Often times it shows you multiple listings of the same restaurant, in case you didn’t see it the first time. It can crash/freeze often too. There are no links to restaurant menus so you have to go to the restaurant website to view them. If you are wondering what the restaurant atmosphere is like, photos on Resy will mostly show you the food but nothing about the place itself. Then there is the funky search function…if you type the venue name and hit search, you’ll see an arbitrary list of restaurants but not the one you are looking for. You have to type the venue name slowly, not hit search, wait for Resy to recognize the name and have it pop up under the search bar so you can click on it. Absurd! Also, if you are trying to make a resy from another city, forget it. Just call the restaurant directly. The app only shows nearby restaurants. It doesn’t let you target destination like other reservation apps do. In summary, they’ve signed up a good variety of restaurants but have not put the same effort in making their app user friendly and bringing it to 2022 standards.

Months ago I visited a Charleston restaurant website that said you could book using Resy, so I got the app. However, this restaurant, nor any in Charleston, was not listed, without any explanation for the misinformation. I made my reservation via phone instead. Then, the weekend I was in Charleston, I saw a news article about Resy launching in Charleston (fortunate timing), and I went back to the app. There was the restaurant and there was my reservation -- in triplicate. Whatever, that could be kinks to be worked out. I also saw that my #1 choice (Butcher & Bee) had an opening for that night so I grabbed it. Victory! Thank you Resy!

What I liked: Attractive interface, some of the best Charleston restaurants, including ones I'd tried to book via Open Table or Trip Advisor but weren't listed. I like that it showed me available openings, and since there are only a few restaurants (I think six) and they are all top-tier, there were all ones in which I was interested. Other apps include restaurants not at the same level and I appreciated the vetting here. It was very easy to book and very easy to cancel, and the text message reminders 30 minutes before my booking were welcome. I did not use this feature, but you can expressing wrest in a restaurant and I believe the app will notify you when there is an opening. For a town like Charleston where you have to book three months out for certain tables, that's terrific.

Not as good: I needed to change my initial reservation (the one appearing in triplicate) from 6 to 5 people but could not do that; not sure why. Cancelling is a quick swipe that seemed almost too easy. I also could not view the menu, a feature I like on Open Table. I understand these top tier places have frequently-changing menus, but when booking for a group it is helpful to have some examples of cuisine, price etc.

Overall I am happy to see these restaurants offer online booking, which is the #1 benefit to Resy. I look forward to trying it in a city where I am less familiar with the best places to see where Resy takes me.

Resy is, by far, the most frustrating, poorly designed reservation app on the market. Why so many restaurants are connected to it is a complete mystery. Why the developers of the app don’t fix the glaring errors, glitches, bugs, and horrible UX, I don’t understand. If I didn’t absolutely have to use this awful piece of software that works like it was designed by a 12 year old on summer vacation to make reservations, trust me I never would.

Here are just a few of the horrible features of the Resy user experience:
-the search function is complete inconsistent, after you click through to one restaurant always takes you back to the macro view of the MSA you are searching no matter how finely detailed your search was.
-When you use the “notify” feature, which in theory is great, once you’ve put on two notifys for the time period you are searching in the app automatically changes the date forward by one day. If you don’t realize it, your notifications are for the wrong date.
-Once you have put on one notify, the next one has no available times after the earliest time you’ve set the previous notify for. For example, if you set a notify at restaurant A for 7 to 8 pm on Thursday, then when you try to set a notify at restaurant B you can only set the notify at 7. You then have to go into your profile, open your notifys and change the time at restaurant B manually to 7 to 8.
-One last scathing remark, although I have more but I’ll refrain, is that if you are trying to search for availability at a particular restaurant there is no functionality to open the calendar and see other dates than the one you are searching. Sometimes, if you tap on the date about 20 times, you can get the calendar to open, so clearly it is meant to function that way, but it does not.

I’ll just add that I have the latest iPhone with the most up to date iOS and I’m tech savvy. I’m also about as much of a foodie as you can find so I’m facile with every reservation system: open table, Tock, seven rooms and Resy. It is beyond belief that restaurants base their livelihood on this piece of trash app without a thought to the fact that it’s their diner’s first experience with their establishment. It’s also beyond belief that no one at Resy has bothered to use this app and seen these glaring errors. Make a reservation people, experience this and fix this thing please.

It's impossible to look and make a resv. In advance, I only downloaded to resv. A date for the bluebox cafe at tiffanys and they force you to download resy which doesn't even allow you to look at dates! Awful!

Slow app! Once you get a notification that a table you’ve been looking for is available, it always takes about 2-3 minutes for the app to load the reservation, by which point the reservation is already taken! what gives ?

Why is your app always so slow to launch?
Why do I have to put all my criteria in again if I change the number of ppl I’m searching for?

But really - why is it still so so slow? I would use it more if didn’t always take half a lifetime to open up.

— stop automatic loading of all restaurants in the area each time the app is opened or refreshed. This is not useful for those who want to check reservations for a specific restaurant. It’s simpler to reserve via website than app.

— stop spamming for reservations

Tried to use Resy in my computer but evidently I forgot which email address I used to sign up, and there is NO functionality to reset on the computer. Fortunately, the phone app offered the ability to create a new account. Why is there NO help button online? Frustrating!

This is the worst app I have ever used. The list of restaurants covering a small radius of the entire search area just repeats over and over like an endless scrolling Groundhog’s Day rather than expanding to show more options, so you’ll see the same 5-10 spots over and over and over until the end of time. HOW IS IT SO BAD?

Since I downloaded trash Nov 2018 it has frozen and been unusable the 3 times I’ve tried to use it. It’s always currently updated and still not making a difference. I deleted and re downloaded it, which seemed to work. Went back 2 days later to view my reservation and once again, frozen. Won’t let you click on anything, wont load.. y’all need to get it together

The restaurants on this app look great. Unfortunately we will never know if they are actually great because the app experience is absolutely terrible.

It constantly freezes, reloads for upwards of 30 seconds or simply just quits. One cannot filter for restaurants or locations easily, and changing the date freezes the entire system causing you to have to start over. I have never encountered a more frustrating app. I don’t know why any restaurant would choose it over opentable or even just a phone call.

I downloaded this app and made a reservation for 4 at a local restaurant, only to arrive and find that the restaurant had no record of my booking (despite receiving an email confirmation from Resy and a text 10 minutes before my reservation). I contacted Resy to complain and they still haven’t gotten back to my last email (it’s been 5 days). If you make an app that is solely responsible for reservation booking, and your customer goes out of their way to go to a restaurant that has no record of this booking, you have some explaining to do. Instead of that they seem to be ignoring me, which shows they have horrible customer service. Spare yourself the hassle and use open table instead.