American Express will pay $700 million to acquire TheFork from Tripadvisor, taking full ownership of the European-headquartered restaurant booking and management platform. The cash transaction ends Tripadvisor's decade-long ownership of the asset, originally bought as Paris-based LaFourchette in 2014.

The price marks a clean exit for Tripadvisor and gives Amex direct distribution into European restaurants — a category that already ranks among the largest spend pools for its cardmember base.

What does the deal cover?

TheFork runs restaurant discovery, online booking, and a back-office management tool used by independent operators and small chains across multiple European markets, with France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal among its largest user bases. Tripadvisor folded LaFourchette into the wider TheFork brand after the 2014 acquisition and has since run it as a separate vertical within the group.

The asset sold includes both the diner-facing reservation app and the restaurant-side subscription and pay-per-click tools that monetise bookings for hospitality operators.

Why is Amex buying into European restaurant tech?

American Express already owns Resy in the United States, acquired in 2019, and runs card-linked dining programmes against that inventory. TheFork adds a parallel European infrastructure at a moment when Amex is targeting spend growth in dining and travel — its highest-fee merchant categories. Owning the booking layer, rather than integrating with a third-party platform, lets Amex capture both interchange economics and direct marketing access to restaurants.

The acquisition also repositions Amex closer to Asian card-network operators that have moved deeper into merchant-facing technology, a path European card issuers have generally avoided until now.

How will it affect European restaurants?

Operators using TheFork Manager should expect continuity through transition — neither Amex nor Tripadvisor has flagged a re-platforming. The strategic question is whether Amex will overlay TheFork onto existing card benefits in London, Paris, and Madrid, the way it bundles Resy perks in the US. If it does, restaurants with strong cardholder traffic could see a measurable lift in bookings and average cover size; smaller operators without loyalty marketing budgets may face rising cost-per-click as the platform seeks to monetise more aggressively to justify the $700M price tag.

The deal also concentrates European restaurant-reservation supply with a card-network owner rather than a neutral software vendor — a shift EU and UK competition authorities will scrutinise closely.

What happens next?

The transaction requires regulatory clearances, including EU and UK competition review given TheFork's role in the bloc's online restaurant reservation market. Closing is expected within the second half of the year, subject to those approvals. Amex will then integrate TheFork into its merchant services arm.

For Tripadvisor, the deal adds roughly $700M in cash earmarked for capital return and core travel investment. For European hospitality operators, the next milestones are the antitrust timetable and the first wave of Amex-linked promotion overlays expected ahead of the 2025 summer dining season.