Chase teams with Tock to support restaurant recovery
Nick Kokonas, Tock CEO joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss the latest as Chase teams up with Tock to support local restaurant recovery.
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: As we were just discussing, things are, indeed, reopening. That doesn't mean, however, that many of the different businesses that struggle during the pandemic are home free. And there is a new partnership that is aiming to help some of the restaurants and wineries that are still trying to recover from this period of time. It's between Chase Bank and Tock, which is a reservation service that services restaurants, wineries, and the like. Nick Kokonas, the Tock CEO, is joining us now.
So basically, what this does is folks who are Chase business customers can get up to $1,200 a year to put towards monthly subscription fees with Tock, right, if I'm describing that right, Nick. And so what kind of--
NICK KOKONAS: That's perfect.
JULIE HYMAN: --services do you guys provide? And what are you guys hoping that this will bring to the customers?
NICK KOKONAS: Well, Tock is an all-in-one booking platform for restaurants that includes events, ordinary reservations, pop-ups even direct to consumer sales. And then when the pandemic hit, we quickly built Tock to go, to really provide a bridge to this moment now. But what we found, in many ways, is that flipping the light switch off for restaurants, while painful and incredibly difficult on the industry and on individual businesses, was pretty instant.
Ramping them back open is very, very difficult right now. Supply chain issues, labor shortages, and then you have this insane demand, which is wonderful, ordinarily, where people are dying to go back out to eat and to their favorite restaurants. And you combine all those things together, and you get a lot of difficulty and frustration. So our partners at Chase, which we've been working with for a couple of years now, have basically said, well, if you're a Chase client and you're a Tock client, we don't want you to pay for your monthly fees for the rest of the year. And so that's the program in a nutshell. And it's being very, very well received as we've rolled it out today.
JULIE HYMAN: Let's go back to that demand question for a minute. You have about 7,000 different businesses, I believe, on your platform. Is everybody booked up now? I mean, what are you seeing in terms of the reservation demand? And then those areas of friction that you mentioned.
NICK KOKONAS: Yeah, I mean, it's different in different areas of the country, of course. But at the end of the day, the demand is back to pre-pandemic levels or higher. That said, the supply is not. And so, what we're seeing with a lot of restaurants is that they have to artificially constrain the number of customers that they can serve well every night so that their teams aren't overwhelmed, so the service and food remains very-- standards remain very high. So I don't know how long that's going to take to normalize. But it's taking as long or longer than the initial shutdown at the beginning of the pandemic.
JULIE HYMAN: And talk to me a little bit more about Tock and how your business has been evolving. We were talking during the break that you have really signed on a lot of new winery clients. How does that work exactly?
NICK KOKONAS: Well, we've always-- you know, I own restaurants in Chicago as well. And so as a restaurant owner, you know, there is always-- there is a no-show problem and where 10%, 12%, 13% of the people that make ordinary reservations simply don't call or don't show up. And that's why when you show up to an 8 o'clock reservation on Saturday, they don't seat you right away. So I was always looking for ways of taking these wonderful experiences and actually selling them to the diners and letting them know what's available.
And what we found out was that a lot of other businesses have those time slotted experiences as well. And one of them is wineries. Wineries used to use their tasting room almost as like a loss leader, where you tour and taste and hopefully you'd sell-- buy a case of wine going out the door. And yet the wineries have realized that some people want to drink the library wines, the old wine. Some people want to have a picnic in the vineyard.
And so over the last couple of years, we've signed up over 250 wineries and mostly in California, Oregon, and Washington state, but really, all over the country. And we're starting now to see wineries in Australia and New Zealand, elsewhere, also understand that these experiences are what people crave. And it's not that different than going to your favorite pizza place and sitting right in front of the pizza oven and watching the cooks make the pizza and having a glass of Chianti. You know, it's just a wonderful experiential thing. That's what Tock connects consumers with-- great hospitality experiences.
JULIE HYMAN: Nick, thanks for being here. Nick Kokonas is CEO of Tock. Appreciate it.