"So in the interest of ethics and fairness, I want to talk to restaurants about working with them directly on a better reservation system."
It's not likely that a restaurant (or anyone else) would want to go into a business partnership with someone who has clearly demonstrated that they're willing to lie to make a buck.
Also, as a commenter in the Valleywag article[1] pointed out, it's easy for restaurants to defeat this: just require diners to show an ID to claim their reservations.
[1] http://valleywag.gawker.com/restaurant-reservation-scalping-...
What? As someone who frequently puts in random names for reservations, I fail to see what is unethical about this…
Why on earth does a random restaurant deserve my real name? The transaction going on there is on a different level than that.
> It's easy for restaurants to defeat this: just require diners to show an ID to claim their reservations.
Again, no. If a restaurant demands ID before they seat me, that is a restaurant I will never patronize.
Well, it's not unethical like you're injecting babies with a controversial drug. It's quite mildly unethical - a reservation is a promise. Promising something with a fake name is a little unethical - you're asking someone to do something for you, but offering no avenue of recourse if you don't hold up your end of the bargain. I think in this case that it's unethical to the same degree that taking some ballpoints home from work is stealing.
Maybe because some asshat is selling reservations without their permission or consent?
To me it seems like an innocent-enough experiment. If he wants to scale it, he'll have to make it work for restaurants too. And if he does- great! Margin-stressed restaurants get an extra source of income.
By making fake reservations, he's not solving any problem, only creating a new one - he's artificially reducing the supply of reservations, and then charging for them.
Yes, you say you've started out small, with manual phone usage, etc. But then you go on to say: "So in the interest of ethics and fairness, I want to talk to restaurants about working with them directly on a better reservation system." Sounds like you want to scale it, and make money off of it yourself, after all.
Whereas it seems to me that for high-demand restaurants the manual approach, exists that way because it won't scale. Anyone can get a reservation, if they're willing to wait a few weeks, it doesn't matter what they're willing/able to pay. And once you automate that, how do you keep it from being abused and effectively turning into a sort of demand tax? In which case the restaurant could be pocketing that money themselves by simply making the cost of dining there that high in the first place, but if they didn't, it's probably because they didn't want to restrict so heavily based on spending ability. (Well, and because pricing/markets is tricky, and who knows if it would've been successful initially at a higher price... this part is just speculation on my end.)