Yahoo Finance

The cost of dining out isn't getting any cheaper with prices and food away from home still trending higher inflation, weighing on consumers' wallets, and thus shrinking budgets, consumers spending 30% of their food budget on restaurants that is falling from 40% in 2022, but is the dining out spirit still alive and well? Well, here to discuss is Rezi CEO Pablo Rivero and Yahoo Finance is very own Price Furian joining us now to talk about all this. Guys, good to see both of you.

Good to see you. Thank you for having me.

Pablo, so we talk about the consumer all the time on the show, we have very smart economists and strategists that come on. Everybody has a different take. You have a very unique line of sight. So I'm interested to get just your take on the consumer. How healthy, how strong does the consumer look, Pablo?

Yeah, we're seeing tremendous demand for dining, right? It is

tremendous demand. Yeah.

So it's consistent year-over-year. So we saw $100 billion of spend on American Express, who owns Rezi, right? $100 billion of spend in 2023, um as a dining category alone. Um, it is being a passion area for card members, um and you do see that demand translating to restaurant reservations. Of course, restaurants are a micro economy within neighborhoods, right? So every neighborhood's a little bit different. Restaurants are struggling with high rents, right? High cost, inflation, labor costs. So you see activity that varies city to city, but you also see restaurants opening up, right? You see new concepts going to different cities and diners going out there and enjoying those restaurants.

And you mentioned new concepts. Rezi's sort of done a bunch of different things, like Carbone Beach in Miami, the Missy Governor's Island activation, the 18 person only experience there on an island, take a private boat there. What is the kind of high-end consumer telling you? I know a lot of people that I know use Rezi pretty heavily, and that's kind of their go-to spot, but also for higher end reservations. What are they, what are they telling you exactly?

Yeah, so consumers are looking for the opportunity to connect, right? At the end of the day, that's why they go to restaurants. They want to connect over the table. Um, and they also want to have a unique experience, right? Something that they can't have anywhere else. And American Express has been in the dining entertainment industry for a very long time. So we look for ways to support restaurants by connecting them with these high, higher end earning card members, right? Card members on American Express spend more on average than the average card member that is not American Express. And that's revenue that goes directly to the restaurants' bottom line. And so how do we find ways to connect restaurants with those diners through unique experiences? It's what we've been really focused on since the acquisition.

Yeah. I want to talk about just what you see ahead, probably because Rezi's been around for a while. How do you see it evolving from here? What's the innovation in the pipeline?

Yeah, so we're celebrating 10 years, uh, which is a great milestone. I'm very excited to be here announcing that. We just completed our 600 million reservation. Uh, so we're powering up the dining rooms across the United States. Uh, what we are doing moving forward is continue to do what we did for day one, for restaurants by restaurants. We want to be the voice of restaurants, and we want to hear them. Uh, focus on new products, right? How do we help them connect with more diners? We just announced a new version of our app that allows you to discover that neighborhood gem that you might not know of, right, that you might not know of. So it's really focused on connecting restaurants with diners and incentivizing diners to go and try new restaurants.

So, Pablo, there's kind of a little bit of a dark side to the restaurant reservation game where the highest, most sought-after restaurants are very hard to get into. And people, you know, we say it's because of limited number of tables, and there's only so many Saturday nights, but there's been a lot of talk of bots coming on platforms, just people calling up, making reservations, selling them on another platform. How do you, how do you address those sort of problems and make people feel like they actually have a chance to get into that good restaurant?

Yeah, so bots, you know, are a problem. We do hear from restaurants that it does hurt them from a revenue perspective. They, they lead to a lot of no-shows and late cancellations, which at the end of the day, at a restaurant, every table counts, right? Uh, so we want to work with our customers to address that in multiple ways. Um, while it affects a few customers, not every single restaurant is affected by it. We do take it very seriously. We have a team that is focused on managing this from a reservation fraud perspective. We're investing in our products to identify those bad actors to ensure that we are protecting the consumer and the restaurant as well. Um, at the end of the day, what we want to do is ensure that we show you as well, that restaurant you might not know of. As you said, there's only so many tables on a Saturday night. So is there a neighborhood gem that you might not be familiar with that would give you that perfect experience? We're all up for that.

Pablo, I'm guessing you eat out at a lot of restaurants. I'm thinking, I know you bounce between Miami and New York very quickly. Here in New York, give me, give me a reco.

Um, there's so many, so many good places, but lately, one of my favorites is Don Angie, right here in the West Village.

Don Angie.

Cafe Carmellini, a great example of solid Italian, fantastic hospitality. And in Miami, I love Maty's. Uh, it's a new restaurant from Peruvian chef Valerie Chang. She just won a James Beard award, and she's a Rezi partner. We're really happy to have her on the network.

I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. Pablo, Pras, thank you guys. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.