10,000 restaurants sign up for new contactless dining suite

NEW DELHI: As restaurants prepare to resume operation in Unlock 1.0, over 10,000 restaurants, casual dining or quick-service chains including Subway, Hard Rock Cafe, Mad Over Donuts, Mainland China and The Great Kabab Factory among others, have partnered with Dineout app to provide contactless and safe dining-out experience to their customers.

With the government given restaurants and malls the go-ahead to reopen their establishments from June 8, Dineout will help restaurateurs avoid extraneous contact points inside the restaurants, while still providing their diners seamless and safe dining experience through its end-to-end contactless dining suite.

A total of 40 percent of the initial adopters of the contactless dining solution hail from metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata, while 30 percent are from Hyderabad, Pune and Chandigarh, while the remaining are from tier II and tier III cities.

A recent survey by Dineout across 20 cities in India presented some interesting insights on the factors that determine consumer interest while choosing a restaurant to dine out in the post COVID era. According to the findings, 81 percent of consumers would prefer a digital menu on their smartphones instead of physical menus or tablet-based digital menus. 60 percent of the respondents prefer seamless wallet-based digital payments over cash/cards, while 84 percent would prefer to go digital while providing suggestions or feedback.

Speaking on the changing restaurant business ecosystem, Ankit Mehrotra, Co-Founder & CEO, Dineout said: “The post COVID era would see the advent of Hospitality 2.0 at restaurants and other establishments, not just from an operations perspective, but also in terms of the factors determining excellence. From aligning a restaurant to the new social distancing guidelines to adopting new strategies and approaches to secure a strong come-back with digital alternatives, it’s heartening to see such a remarkable response from the country’s F&B industry. Our goal is to empower more than 20,000 restaurants across 20+ cities with 100 percent safe contactless dining solutions by the end of June 2020.”