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| Free Hospitality Publications |
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Restaurant Industry News
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Tuesday July 3rd, 2007 |
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The maitre d' of hard-to-get reservations
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Pascal Riffaud wants to sell seats at the world's most exclusive restaurants. The only problem, reports Business 2.0: their owners have reservations. |
The appropriate way to begin this column is with a confession: I am a hard-core New York foodie. My wife and I eat out with absurd frequency, devoting as much cash to our gastronomic pursuits as some parents pay for their kids' tuitions.
Sad? Probably. Sick? Possibly. But at least I understand the dilemma of the big-city diner: Scoring last-minute tables at top-shelf joints can be a bitch.
Thus, I was intrigued when I heard that someone had started a kind of StubHub for gourmands -- an online service brokering coveted New York restaurant reservations. That someone is Pascal Riffaud, a former concierge at the Ritz in Paris and the St. Regis in New York, who in 1994 founded Personal Concierge International, a boutique outfit providing clients (for $4,000 a year) assistance in arranging travel, securing tickets to sold-out events, etc.
Now Riffaud has launched PrimeTime Tables, a service that demonstrates vividly how the Web is creating markets around every scarce commodity imaginable -- and royally pissing off those with a vested interest in the established order.
A hip-hop star's MySpace dreams
Immaculately tailored and unfailingly polite, Riffaud is a 43-year-old Frenchman who seems an unlikely provocateur. But he is not a naive one. "I recognized there would be resistance," he tells me over lunch near his Madison Avenue offices. What Riffaud didn't expect was that some of the city's most prominent restaurateurs would dub him a parasite. "I hate that word," he says with a sigh. "I think it's a little bit harsh."
Riffaud's road to culinary controversy began in 2005, when he got a call from a woman who had created a nascent version of PrimeTime Tables. "She was offering reservations strictly to concierges," he explains. But Riffaud thought the service had potential as a Web-based consumer business and offered to buy it.
"I paid $30,000," Riffaud tells me. "The company had no revenue and no technology. What I was buying was the concept."
For a year Riffaud quietly built the business, designing the PTT site, compiling a growing stock of reservations, and offering access to select clients, who could either pay $35 to $45 for a table or shell out for a premier membership ($450 a year) entitling them to a reduced per-reservation rate. Riffaud says, "Everyone thought it was perfect for the businessperson who doesn't have time to think in advance about where he wants to go."
External Source - For the complete article click here
Source - CNNMoney
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