New Delhi, Nov 11, 2019 –
Undeterred by the #logout campaign, Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal on Monday announced a new programme for the Gold members with special deals and offers and free valet parking.
Aiming to serve over 20 crore people in India in the next few years, Goyal said the aim of Zomato “Gold Special” is to take the existing programme to newer heights with the active participation of restaurant partners.
“For our Gold customers, to extend their Gold privileges, we will soon add some special deals and offers from some of the biggest and busiest restaurant names in the industry (all on top of what we already have on Gold),” Goyal said in a statement.
With the new programme, Gold customers will have the privilege of free valet parking in some of their favourite mall properties.
Zomato added 1.10 lakh new Gold members in India in the month of October.
“This shows that in spite of all the hiccups in the journey of Gold in the recent months, including the pricing changes, it still remains a much wanted and much loved product by our users,” said the CEO.
The war between the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) and Zomato started around August 15 over the deep discounting practices of the food aggregator and thousands of restaurants logged out of the platform.
“A few weeks back, we witnessed a restaurant led push against Zomato Gold, where some restaurants abruptly ‘logged out’ of Gold expressing some dissatisfaction with some user policies of Gold.
“That led us to speak to and collect feedback from hundreds of our Gold partners. Based on the feedback we received, we rolled out some changes to Gold,” said Goyal.
Maximum of two unlocks per table was the most valued change for the restaurateur community. Nearly 40 per cent respondents chose this as the change with the most positive impact.
“One unlock per day was the second most valued change with 25 per cent respondents choosing this option, while customer feedback from partners and blocking of abusive/low-rated users was a close third with 22 per cent respondents,” informed Goyal, citing a survey findings.
Discontinuation of Gold trial packs didn’t come up as an important reason with only 9 per cent of respondents choosing this option.
“Over 70 per cent of the respondents agreed that the changes we introduced in Gold made it a more sustainable programme for restaurants to participate in,” Goyal noted.
Zomato is delivering 1.3 million orders a day from 150,000 restaurants across India at more than 10 orders per restaurant per day.
Zomato’s kitchens are operational in 50 cities across India, with 110 kitchen hubs (either completed or under construction). In total, there are 663 kitchen units and kiosks.
The company’s revenue for the first half of the financial year 2019-20 saw a massive three-fold jump – from $63 million in the same period in 2018-2019 to $205 million.
Zomato is currently present in 556 cities. (Agency)
