American Express (NYSE: AXP) and Toast (NYSE: TOST) have announced a strategic multi-year partnership aimed at enhancing personalized hospitality experiences across their respective networks of restaurants and venues in the United States.
The collaboration focuses on building tools that enable seamless and personalized hospitality experiences. This involves combining the guestbook capabilities of American Express’s Resy and Tock platforms with Toast’s Digital Chits technology. Digital Chits allows restaurant staff to view important customer information directly on Toast Go® handhelds and POS terminals during service. The companies will also explore opportunities to leverage Toast capabilities to offer differentiated benefits that enhance the guest and American Express® Card Member experience. Furthermore, the partnership intends to increase visibility for restaurants, wineries, cafes, and bars by making their listings from Resy and Tock available on the Local by Toast app, alongside those using Toast Tables.
This partnership builds on American Express’s significant investments in the dining sector to better serve restaurants, diners, and American Express Card Members and merchants. In 2024, American Express acquired the dining technology platform Rooam to facilitate integrations with leading technology platforms such as Toast. The company also acquired reservation platform Tock, adding 7,000 new restaurants and other venues to the American Express Global Dining network, which already included 20,000 restaurants and venues available on Resy. Resy and Tock have continued to invest in innovation, launching a Resy Android app, Resy’s Discover Tab, Notify Enhancements, and Guest Lifetime Value in the past year to help drive increased demand for restaurants.
For over a decade, Toast has served as a partner for restaurants, providing intuitive, powerful solutions to enhance their success. Recent Toast innovations, including Digital Chits, Menu Upsells, and Advertising powered by ToastIQ—Toast’s intelligence engine—are designed to provide restaurateurs with deeper insights into their operations, supporting data-driven decisions to optimize efficiency and drive growth.
Pablo Rivero, SVP, American Express Global Dining and CEO, Resy and Tock, stated, “Restaurants today deliver exceptional experiences with leaner teams and tighter margins, making intelligent, connected tools more essential than ever. American Express and Toast together can help our partners deliver smarter service and more meaningful connections with their guests to drive both loyalty and growth.”
Aman Narang, CEO and Co-Founder at Toast, commented, “At Toast, we are dedicated to helping the restaurant community thrive. By bringing together two leading companies around a shared vision for enhancing the dining experience, this partnership lays the foundation for finding more ways for restaurants to better serve guests. Through this collaboration, Toast will look to provide our expansive network and innovative technology, empowering restaurants to reach diners and drive guest demand. Working together, we look forward to unlocking added visibility for restaurants and enabling more personalized service, leading to more memorable – and repeat – visits.”
Alex Drummond, EVP and GM, American Express Membership Portfolio Services, added, “Our Card Members spent over $87 billion on dining in the U.S. alone in 2024. This partnership is a natural evolution of our investment in this growing category. As an industry-leading restaurant technology platform, we believe that Toast will seamlessly complement American Express’ premium dining experiences and world class dining network to help usher in a new era of dining.”
Product features are anticipated to commence rollout in 2026. Both companies plan to explore technology that will facilitate richer, more personalized hospitality for guests and Card Members, with the aim of assisting restaurants in filling their dining rooms with high-value diners. It is noted that the use of terms like “partner” or “partnering” in this context does not imply a formal legal partnership, nor does it alter the terms of the relationship between American Express and Toast or their relationships with any third parties.
