A credit card company is becoming one of the biggest owners of restaurant reservations.

In June 2026 American Express agreed to buy TheFork for $700 million.

American Express is buying TheFork. For $700 million the card company has agreed to acquire one of the largest restaurant booking platforms in Europe, 50,000 restaurants across 11 countries. It already owns Resy and Tock in the US. Put the three together and American Express would control around 75,000 bookable venues on both sides of the Atlantic. The deal is expected to close before the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval.

A credit card company is becoming one of the biggest owners of restaurant reservations in the world. But why? The answer is not booking fees. For a business the size of American Express the revenue from reservations is a rounding error. What it’s buying is the dining data. Who eats where, how often, what they spend, which restaurants they choose and when, all of it tied to the card in their pocket. A reservation platform is the cleanest way to capture the moment a guest decides where to eat and everything that comes with that decision. Resy and Tock gave American Express that picture in the US. TheFork gives it Europe.

If you run a restaurant on TheFork, this is the why that matters. Your booking channel, your availability and your guest data now sit inside a global payments company whose core business is not hospitality. The platform may run exactly as it did yesterday. What changed is who owns what flows through it.

It also matters for where this is heading. What an AI assistant needs in order to book your table is a clean, structured, machine-readable record of who is bookable and when. That is precisely what American Express has spent the last few years assembling across three platforms and two continents. Whoever owns that record owns what the AI booking layer reads from next.

I wrote a while back that a card network had quietly owned a reservation platform for six years and that most operators hadn’t noticed. This is what that was the beginning of.

It’s not the only company that has worked this out. DoorDash has built the same kind of position from the delivery side, buying SevenRooms and pulling reservations into its app. One giant is approaching the restaurant booking layer from payments and another from delivery, because both have realised the booking is where the guest relationship and the data actually live.

American Express will soon know more about where your guests eat than you do. The deal looks like it has nothing to do with your restaurant. That’s exactly why it’s worth paying attention to.