In this episode
TL;DR: Pat Venn is Chief Operating Officer of PRIMA, the Miami-based hospitality network that raised a $5 million seed round in August 2026 and is live in New York, Miami, London, Paris and Ibiza. Before PRIMA he ran the global enterprise team at Tock, the reservation platform Nick Kokonas built for his own Alinea Group restaurants, which sold to Squarespace and then to American Express. Pat’s argument on this episode is blunt: restaurants have no idea where their best customers come from, and the single biggest source of new business — somebody’s recommendation — is the one channel nobody has ever been able to track. In this episode Pat walks through why no-shows run 15% to 20% at a busy restaurant, why a loyalty punch card doesn’t help the guest who spends $1,000 at lunch, and what it would mean if a restaurant could see a diner’s value before the table is ever sat.
Who Actually Sent You Your Best Table Last Night?
Almost no restaurant can answer that. They can tell you what the check averaged and which server rang it in. They cannot tell you whether that party walked in because a concierge at the hotel two blocks over recommended them, because a friend of a friend raved about the branzino, or because somebody saw a thirty-second clip on Instagram. That gap is the whole reason PRIMA exists, and it is what Pat Venn and I spent most of this conversation on.
What caught my attention is that Pat isn’t selling a better ad. He’s arguing that the largest single channel in the business has never had plumbing underneath it. “By and large, the biggest of any pie is always recommendations,” he told me. “And again, you cannot attribute that recommendation.”
What Did Tock Teach Pat Venn About No-Shows?
That a no-show problem running 15% to 20% at a busy restaurant can be driven to somewhere between zero and one percent — but only if you change the money, not the policy. Pat spent years at Tock leading its major markets and then its global enterprise business, and he watched deposits and prepayment do what credit-card holds never did.
His framing of why Tock worked is worth hearing even if you never take a reservation. Nick Kokonas built it for his own restaurants, out of his own frustration, and that shaped the product. “People can’t buy what they can’t see,” Pat said. “You can’t attend what you’re not aware of.” Tock wasn’t a reservation book. It was a storefront — the chef’s table, the prix fixe, the wine dinner — with payment attached so the seats didn’t evaporate.
I told Pat I was skeptical the first time I saw that model. What won me over was that it was built for the operator rather than the diner. The credit-card hold, he pointed out, isn’t even hospitable — the guest gets dinged after the fact. Tock sold to Squarespace and then landed at American Express, where Pat led the enterprise team across big restaurant and hotel groups before leaving for PRIMA.
What Is PRIMA, and What Problem Is It Actually Solving?
PRIMA is an affiliate network for the physical world. Instead of signing up diners directly, it partners with businesses that already sit on a supply of valuable people — four- and five-star hotels, high-end residential buildings, concierge networks, travel advisors, loyalty programs, corporations with large travel-and-entertainment spend — and gives them access to a curated roster of restaurants. When a guest books through that partner, both the restaurant and the partner know exactly where the booking came from.
The lineage matters here. PRIMA’s founder and CEO, Alex Zhardanovsky, built one of the first affiliate marketplaces on the internet — the business that connected advertisers with the websites that had ad space to sell. “The entire premise of PRIMA,” Pat said, “is taking that model but putting it into the physical.”
Pat’s diagnosis of the market came from talking to thousands of restaurants in his prior life. Every operator is different, and they all ask the same two questions. “How do I drive more business, and how do I drive the right type of business?” His verdict: “Nobody knows how to solve that. Nobody knows what is actually effective at driving more customers, driving more butts in seats, and nobody knows how to target the right type of diner.”
Why Doesn’t a Standard Loyalty Program Fix This?
Because most loyalty programs are built to look like the competitor’s loyalty program, and because the points don’t travel. A guest who is a proven, high-spending, well-behaved regular at your steakhouse arrives at the steakhouse across the street as a complete stranger. Everything you know about them stays locked in your four walls, and everything they earned with you is worthless the moment they leave.
I asked Pat about this directly because I’d just recorded a solo episode making the case that not all loyalty programs are created equal and that plenty of brands launch one because they feel like they should. He was shaking his head before I finished the question. “A lot of companies rush to loyalty because they look at their competitors and they’re like, we’re not differentiating ourselves. So they build these programs or things that they think the customer wants, but a lot of it just falls flat, or it just looks the same as everything else. And so they’re still in the same spot that they were before.”
What guests actually want, in his read, is access. He points at airlines as the industry that got this right: a United 1K member has doors open to them that a silver member does not, and everybody in the program understands the ladder they’re on. A free lava cake is not that. We went deep on the mechanics of turning a first visit into a real relationship in Turning One-Time Visits Into Loyalty: Guestologie’s Ryan, and this conversation is the natural sequel — what happens when that relationship can follow the guest out the door.
What If Restaurants Could Score Diners the Way Uber Scores Riders?
That is the part of PRIMA’s vision that I had genuinely never considered, and it is the piece most likely to make operators sit up. Pat wants to build a profile of the diner that travels business to business: how much they spend, how they treat staff, how they tip, how often they go out, and how often they actually show up when they say they will.
“The most embarrassing thing in the world is a bad Uber rating. Uber has done a very good job at assigning value to a customer and creating the right behavior so that that Uber rating goes up, not the other way.”
Pat Venn, Chief Operating Officer, PRIMA
Run that forward and the incentives flip in a direction most restaurant technology never touches. The guest is now motivated to call ahead instead of ghosting, to treat the staff well, to be the kind of patron a room wants. And the restaurant gets something it has never had: a read on the value of a booking before the guest walks in, even on a first visit. As Pat put it, if you’re trustworthy and you’ve proven it over and over, “every restaurant in every city would take you last minute.”
The dark-mirror version is worth saying out loud: nobody in hospitality wants a social credit score for dinner. Pat’s answer is that value is not just spend — trust, courtesy and reliability are the components he keeps naming, and the high-net-worth diner is where PRIMA started, not where it intends to end.
The Capital Grille Problem
I gave Pat a live example from my own calendar. I sit in a CEO group that meets the fourth Friday of every month at the same Capital Grille. Eight to ten people, roughly a thousand-dollar check, at lunch. The guy who organizes it gets treated like royalty there, and he should — but that treatment is entirely a function of the staff recognizing his face over time.
Flemings is directly across the street. We went there once. I am certain that store felt it that day, and I am equally certain Flemings had no idea who had just walked in or what they were worth. “Flemings had no idea before he walked in, right?” Pat said. “So how would that treatment have changed if they actually knew how that person came in?”
That is the whole thesis in one lunch reservation. Every operator I talk to has a version of this story. Michael Ungaro told a related one about being invisible until his family started telling their own story, in Why Storytelling Saved San Pedro Fish Market — Michael Ungaro.
How Do You Attribute a Recommendation in the Physical World?
You put a rail underneath it. PRIMA’s mechanic is that every booking carries its source: if a guest at the Waldorf Astoria books American Bar through the hotel’s PRIMA link, American Bar knows the reservation came from the Waldorf, and the Waldorf earns on it. Same for a travel advisor, a concierge, a residential building, or an influencer with a storefront in their Linktree.
Pat calls the destination the recommendation economy. “All that means is any person that recommends anything should have attribution. And restaurants will pay for that attribution in the same way that they pay for Google ads. There’s no difference, except they know exactly where the customer came from and how valuable that specific channel is.”
If that sounds familiar, it should. It is the same unsolved problem from a different angle as the one Brett Linkletter and I worked through in Restaurant Marketing You Can Track — Brett Linkletter, Dishio. Restaurants spend on influencers, Google ads and social ads with almost no line of sight into which dollar produced which guest. The difference here is that PRIMA is going after the channel that never had a dashboard at all.
Isn’t This Just Paying People to Say Nice Things?
I pushed on this hard, because I could hear the objection coming from listeners. We all know what happens to a channel once money enters it — the Google ad with the three-point-font disclosure, the review that reads like a press release. Why doesn’t a paid recommendation network turn into slop?
Pat’s answer is that the recommender is scored too. A recommender who sends people to bad restaurants loses the audience that made them worth paying in the first place. He also thinks the current arrangement is already broken in a much uglier way.
“There’s no more toxic relationship than influencers in restaurants right now. The influencer comes in and says, give me a free lunch or give me a thousand dollars. And the restaurant’s like, for what? And the influencer says, well, I’m going to drive you business. And the restaurant goes, how do I know?”
Pat Venn, Chief Operating Officer, PRIMA
His point is that influencers frequently are driving business and simply cannot prove it, which is exactly why the relationship is adversarial. Pay on performance and the argument disappears. He compares it to LTK and ShopMy — affiliate marketplaces where the consumer knows the creator earns on the link and books it anyway, because the trust is real. Whether that translates cleanly from a spray tan to a Tuesday dinner reservation is the open question, and I’d rather it be tested with attribution than without.
What Does It Take for a Restaurant to Get On?
About a ten-minute call, according to Pat, and no change to your stack. PRIMA does not replace the reservation system or ask anyone to rip out technology — it sits on top of what the restaurant already runs. There is no subscription. The restaurant pays only when business actually shows up, and PRIMA splits its cut with whoever drove the booking.
Operationally the restaurant sets the terms: hours, and how many additional covers it is willing to release in a given slot when it shows sold out. PRIMA’s own materials put the restaurant’s share of the access fee at 60%, on top of the check itself. For anyone who has sat through a year-long POS migration, a ten-minute call with no integration is a refreshingly low bar — and a reminder that the systems layer and the demand layer are finally becoming separable, something that also came up when I talked scale and unit economics with the Surcheros team in Surcheros: The Tex-Mex Franchise Winning in Towns Everyone Else Skips.
What’s In It for the Hotel?
Revenue that used to walk out the front door. This was the cleanest line in the interview and the one I’d put in front of any hotel GM.
“A hotel specifically, they spend so much money getting people to the hotel. The second that person leaves those four walls, their earning potential goes away. We fixed that.”
Pat Venn, Chief Operating Officer, PRIMA
The hotel promotes PRIMA as an amenity — a link, an email, a text that says because you’re staying here, you have access to the best restaurants and experiences in town, including tables you could not book publicly. The guest feels taken care of. The restaurant gets a qualified booking with a known source. The hotel earns on a guest it previously stopped monetizing at the lobby door. Pat’s framing of the compounding is the part operators should notice: whoever brings a person into the network earns on that person for as long as they keep using the platform, not just on the first booking.
Where Is PRIMA Live Right Now?
New York, Miami, London, Paris and Ibiza as of this recording, with Barcelona, Madrid, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC and Chicago named as next up. The stated ambition is the hundred to hundred and fifty largest markets globally. Miami is home base — it is where the company launched and where the network is densest.
His favorite proof point is Mila in Miami, which Pat described as the highest-grossing restaurant in the country. It started small with PRIMA and now takes nearly every reservation the network sends, because the guests arriving are coming from the Faena, the W, the One, the Ritz and the Edition. In practice PRIMA became a VIP channel for them — bookings worth making room for.
Pat is candid that the company is still in what he calls the network formation stage. Miami is real; New York, London and Paris are early. A network business is only as good as its density, and density takes time.
The Taco Guy in Cabo
Here is the story I told Pat that I think explains the whole business better than any slide would. I was in Cabo San Lucas with a customer, maybe forty of us off a tour bus in the downtown area. We asked the bus driver where to get the best tacos, and he gave us a name. Then we asked somebody in town, and he said no, no, no — that place is for the tourists. Let me take you to the real one. He walked us a block over.
My buddy was baffled. It happened because that guy was getting paid by the restaurant to bring us there, on top of the tacos he expected us to buy him. That is attribution, commission and performance marketing, running perfectly well in a Mexican street economy — and it does not exist anywhere in the software the rest of us run. Pat’s response cut to the mechanism: if the recommender sends you somewhere bad, nobody trusts that recommender again.
Where Does This Go From Here?
Beyond restaurants, eventually — experiences, events, ticketing, and in principle any service where you’d ask a friend before you’d ask Google. Pat used the electrician example: when he needs one, he is not searching “best electrician,” he is texting the friend who just had an electrical problem. There is no structural reason that same rail can’t run under home services or anything else.
He was disciplined about the sequencing. The near-term job is hospitality: get users onto the platform through the affiliate partners, start scoring diners, and fix the fact that loyalty doesn’t transfer restaurant to restaurant. Everything else is the North Star, not the roadmap.
For operators listening, the near-term takeaway is smaller and more practical than the vision: you almost certainly cannot answer where your best guests came from this month. That is a data problem you can start working on today, with or without PRIMA, and it is the same muscle as knowing your plate costs — which is exactly the ground James Jones and I covered in US Foods’ Menu IQ: Snap a Recipe, See Your Food Cost.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the recommendation economy in restaurants?
It is Pat Venn’s term for making word-of-mouth trackable and payable. Today a concierge, a hotel, a travel advisor or an influencer can send a restaurant thousands of dollars in business with no record that it happened and no compensation. The recommendation economy adds an attribution rail so the restaurant knows the source of every booking and the recommender earns on the business they actually drove.
How does PRIMA make money, and what does a restaurant pay?
There is no subscription. PRIMA is performance-based: the restaurant pays only when the network delivers a booking, and PRIMA shares that fee with the affiliate partner who sourced the guest. PRIMA’s published materials put the restaurant’s share of the access fee at 60%, in addition to the guest’s check. Restaurants keep their existing reservation system — PRIMA sits on top of it.
What cities is PRIMA live in?
At the time of this recording, PRIMA was live in New York, Miami, London, Paris and Ibiza, with Barcelona, Madrid, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC and Chicago named as the next launches. Miami is the company’s home market and its densest network. The long-term target Pat named is the 100 to 150 largest markets worldwide.
How is PRIMA different from a restaurant loyalty program?
A loyalty program is single-brand and non-transferable — everything a guest earns with you is worthless at the restaurant across the street. PRIMA is trying to build a diner profile that travels between restaurants, based on spend, reliability, tipping and how the guest treats staff, so a restaurant can understand a first-time guest’s value before they are seated.
Can influencers or content creators use PRIMA?
Yes. Pat described creators as an affiliate type alongside hotels and concierges: an influencer can host a PRIMA storefront of their favorite restaurants on Instagram or in a link-in-bio, and earn on bookings made through it. The model is the same one LTK and ShopMy use for products, applied to reservations, which is what makes an influencer’s contribution provable rather than argued over.
Takeaways for Operators
- Ask the question you can’t answer. Pull last month’s biggest checks and try to name the source of each one. The blank spaces are your real marketing report.
- Not all covers are equal. The guest who books four weeks out at midnight and orders a salad is not the guest who books through a concierge on a Thursday. Filling the room and filling it well are different problems.
- Loyalty that doesn’t travel isn’t leverage. If your best regular is anonymous everywhere else, you are carrying the cost of building that relationship and none of the portability.
- Performance beats retainer. Whether it’s PRIMA or an influencer, pay for outcomes you can trace. The absence of tracking is what makes those relationships adversarial.
- Your neighbors are a channel. Hotels, residential buildings and concierges near you already have the guests you want and no way to monetize sending them. That conversation costs nothing to start.
About the Guest
Pat Venn is Chief Operating Officer of PRIMA, a Miami-headquartered hospitality network connecting hotels, residences, concierges, travel advisors and creators with restaurants, bars and experiences. He was appointed COO in September 2025. Before PRIMA he was Head of Enterprise at Tock, where he built and led the global enterprise sales team through the company’s acquisition by Squarespace and subsequently American Express. Connect with him on LinkedIn or at patrick@primavip.co. PRIMA was founded by Alex Zhardanovsky, who previously built Azoogle’s affiliate marketing business, and closed a $5 million seed round in August 2026.
Companies and brands discussed in this episode: PRIMA, Tock, Squarespace, American Express, The Alinea Group, OpenTable, Resy, Mila Miami, Faena, The W, The One, The Ritz-Carlton, The Edition, Waldorf Astoria, Capital Grille, Flemings, Uber, LTK, ShopMy, United Airlines.
Read the Full Transcript
Prefer to read it? The full transcript of episode 356 with Pat Venn is available with speaker labels, section headings and jump navigation.
More conversations in this vein: Cracking Eggs in the Drive-Thru: Farmer Boys’ John Lucas on running a brand where the guest relationship is the product.
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