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Dineout, which claims to be India's largest dining out platform, is looking to expand into newer geographies, both in India and abroad. The company is present in 11 Indian cities and has tie ups with close to 15,000 restaurants.
According to co-founder and CEO Ankit Mehrotra, plans are to expand into 10 more cities this year and add another 10,000 restaurants taking the total count to around 25,000, by the end of this fiscal.
Exploring new outlets
Dineout’s business-to-consumer (B2C) arm helps customers discover restaurants, aids in reservations and offers discounts.
It also has various programmes such as Dineout Pay, which helps in bill payment at over 12,000 restaurants through an app or a mobile site, and also assures cash back. Gourmet Passport, a membership plan, offers “Buy One Get One Free” at around 1,000 restaurants across eight cities.
“Dining out is no longer limited to an occasion but people are looking to explore new restaurants and cuisine. In 2018-19, we seated close to 20 million consumers across our network of restaurants. We expect that to increase to 50 million this year,” Mehrotra told BusinessLine .
Dineout claims to have around 2-5 million diners across its partner restaurants every month. Booking a table through the platform gives a customer 15-20 per cent discount.
If a customer pays additionally through Dineout Pay, he gets more discounts or cash-backs. This helps bring down the net bill amount, he said highlighting the benefit of booking a table through the app.
Mehrotra estimates that close to one billion people dine out annually in India. The company feels there is a huge, yet untapped opportunity in the business.
Managing service
Apart from customer service, the company has a B2B (business-to-business) wing through InResto and Torqus programmes that offer restaurant service management. This basically helps restaurants manage all their backend activities, ranging from procurement to billing to taking feedback from customers.
Under this B2B programme, it currently has tie ups with around 9,000 restaurants in India and in countries like Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Kenya.
“The biggest challenge for any restaurant today is that they do not recognise their customers and the cost of customer acquisition is increasing steadily. Through our programmes InResto and Torqus, we help restaurants improve and customise their services to a particular customer by recognising, retaining and re-engaging with him/her on an ongoing basis,” he said.
The company plans to take its offerings to newer geographies like Singapore, West Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe either through partnerships or direct acquisition.
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