by Jerry Cornfield, Washington State Standard
April 15, 2026
A Seattle business leader contends a major online restaurant reservation service is making changes this week that may violate Washington’s consumer protection laws and he wants the attorney general to get involved.
The president of the Seattle Latino Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce has asked state Attorney General Nick Brown to assess if the revised agreement terms OpenTable is implementing Thursday “unfairly restrict restaurant choice and competition.”
Marcos Wanless, the chamber’s founder, contends the updated language will require restaurants using OpenTable to effectively make it the primary table management system for customers.
“This is not simply a contract dispute. It raises broader questions about fair competition, small business autonomy, and whether a dominant platform can impose terms that make it impractical for restaurants to use alternative tools or channels,” he wrote in his April 9 letter to Brown.
“Restaurants should be able to meet diners where they are, choose the technology that works best for them, and operate without unnecessary restraints,” he added.
While restaurants will still be able to use more than one platform, Wanless said the concern is whether that remains workable. For example, restaurant owners who do so will have to manually input reservations made via another service into OpenTable to avoid double bookings, he said in the letter.
“This new policy from OpenTable will only make it harder for our members to succeed,” he wrote.
The attorney general’s antitrust division is looking into the matter. This unit enforces state and federal laws that prohibit unreasonable restraints of commerce.
“We take complaints received from the public very seriously, and we will review your letter to determine if OpenTable’s new terms of service may constitute an anticompetitive practice,” wrote Jonathan Mark, chief of the antitrust division, in an email to Wanless on Tuesday.
Company defends changes
OpenTable, part of Booking Holdings, Inc., covers more than 60,000 restaurants worldwide. It is a dominant force in a field that includes other online reservation platforms such as Resy, Tock and European forces such as TheFork and Quandoo.
The language in OpenTable’s terms stirring angst with Wanless refers to the platform as the “system of record” for restaurants’ reservations.
On Tuesday, the company said in a statement to The Standard that this “isn’t a new term or a new way” of working with many of its clients. Though it is now getting extended to all of them.
A primary reason for the change is to better protect restaurateurs’ and customers’ data, the company said.
“Specifically, there has been an increase in the prevalence of unauthorized parties, who in some cases have been encouraged by our direct competitors to bypass technical controls or scrape data without permission. This includes pulling availability or extracting guest and restaurant data without permission, or attempting to replicate bookings,” the statement reads.
It adds that, “These unauthorized bad actors pose significant risk to the safety and stability of OpenTable’s system, and therefore to all of our restaurant partners.”
In a March 25 online post, company officials wrote that restaurants aren’t barred from working with other table management systems. But they must put their same inventory on OpenTable and make it the primary booking system linked from a restaurant’s website.
Ultimately, the end-goal of the changes is to “build a single-source of truth for guest and restaurant data, maintain real-time availability, and guarantee that when your guest wants to book a table at your restaurant, that table actually exists.”
Correction: This story was updated to clarify what inventory must be listed on OpenTable under the new rules.
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