$365 to Book a Table for 2 in New York? A New Law Could Stop That.

It is no secret that it can be difficult to reserve a table at many popular New York City restaurants, especially with some third-party services using computer bots to make reservations and then selling them at steep prices.

Diners will be happy to know the task could soon get easier.

On Thursday, state lawmakers approved a bill that would prevent such third-party services from “listing, advertising, promoting or selling reservations for a food service establishment” without the establishment’s approval. The legislation requires Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature before becoming law.

The bill is a “major victory for the hospitality industry in New York,” Melissa Fleischut, the president of the New York State Restaurant Association, a trade group, said in a statement. She said the law would ensure that diners “no longer have to compete with predatory bots.”

Unlike the reservation services Resy and OpenTable, the third-party websites targeted by the legislation often do not have relationships with the restaurants for which they post listings, lawmakers wrote in the bill, adding that the platforms “forced consumers to endure enormous fees while devastating small businesses.”

In recent years, wealthy New Yorkers have spent hundreds of dollars for reservations at some of the city’s most in-demand restaurants, using sites like Appointment Trader. People who already have tables and do not want them for whatever reason use the sites to sell bookings, as do bots that have snapped up online reservations.

Prices for listings can vary widely. On Friday, for example, Appointment Trader listed reservations for parties for two that evening at Tatiana, which The Times has rated as the best restaurant in the city this year, as available: one for $80; the other for $365. The average cost for a reservation at Tatiana over the past three months was around $100.