Why is it so hard to go out with friends in NYC? Let's break it down.

PartyPlace

PartyPlace

— 3 min read
Why is it so hard to go out with friends in NYC? Let's break it down.

You’re not alone, trying to reserve a spot at a bar for groups or parties in NYC is harder than it needs to be. 

On average, it takes party hosts 2-5 weeks to nail down a venue, with anywhere from 10 to 40 emails before reaching an agreement. 

If you try to book a spot for a larger group, you’ll learn that Resy and OpenTable aren’t any help for groups over six, or if you're lucky eight.

Until Party Place, it was an arduous and tedious process.

  1. You spend hours doing research, starting with a Google search–"places to have a party in NYC” or “best birthday bars near me"– and then falling down the social media rabbit hole of Top 5 videos.
  2. You put together a list of places you'd love to host at after hours of mindless scrolling, only to discover you're only 10% there.
  3. You try to call the venue. If you're lucky someone answers, but more often than not they tell you to email them or fill out an annoying form on their website.
  4. Half the time you get ignored; no response, your outreach straight to the ether.
  5. The other half of the time you get cryptic and unhelpful responses, with insufficient information, tons of jargon, prices that seems ridiculous, and/or dates that are unavailable.

All you wanted was a simple way to reserve a bar for your group to come and spend money with a clear idea of what you’re getting and how much it will cost. You thought booking a bar or restaurant in NYC would be straightforward—you thought wrong.

Why is that?

"At the end of the day, bars and restaurants are not set up to make “large party reservations” because these bookings can disrupt their regular flow of business, impacting the revenue they’d normally earn from regular reservations, walk-ins, and their usual operations," NYC Bar owner. 

To ensure venues make at least as much as they would during normal operations, they invented two types of packages for groups, parties and events: 

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Minimum Spend: The party host agrees that the group will collectively spend a minimum amount on food and/or beverages over a specified amount of time.
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Drink and/or Food Package: Guests are offered a selection of food and/or beverages for a specified time, usually for a set fee per guest. This fee is often agreed upon and paid by the host in advance.

Seems simple, right?

Well, not exactly.

The cost structure is still unclear—do you need to pay anything upfront? How do bar minimums work? And what exactly are you getting at the bar?

Next week, we’ll demystify what it really takes to reserve a bar or restaurant in NYC for any event or get-together so that you can do so with ease and confidence. Plus, we’ll show you how Party Place makes this process seamless—in under 5 minutes.

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