#529 2013 · Eatigo · Restaurants
Eatigo filled Bangkok's dead afternoons by pricing tables like off-peak seats
the problem
Tables sat empty from three to six
background
Restaurants pay the same rent and staff costs whether a table is full or empty, but four Bangkok-based founders from the telecom industry sized the waste at a global scale: the restaurant industry runs at roughly 30% capacity utilization, meaning most seats generate zero revenue most of the time, even though the trillion-dollar market as a whole was healthy.
Group-buying sites like Groupon had already tried discounting restaurants and mostly poisoned the well — deep, undifferentiated discounts drew stampedes that overwhelmed kitchens during hours that were already busy, while doing nothing for the dead hours restaurants actually needed filled, so many restaurant owners had come to see 'deal platforms' as a net loss rather than a fix.
the move
Time-slot reservations with discounts up to 50% pegged to off-peak hours, filling tables that would expire empty at 4pm.
the payoff
Restaurant partners on the platform reported roughly 20% month-on-month growth in reservations and revenue, with Eatigo claiming over 700 partner restaurants and one diner seated every three seconds of the day on average as of its 2016 funding round.
what came after
Eatigo scaled from Bangkok to Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Philippines and was positioned by press coverage as "the anti-Groupon" for handing restaurants control over exactly when and how deep a discount runs, a restaurant-controlled variant of yield management that later time-slot dining platforms in the region followed.
references
- [1]Meet the start-up with an airline-style method to fill up restaurant seats with more dinersSouth China Morning Post, 2018scmp.com
- [2]Southeast Asia's Eatigo lands $10M+ from TripAdvisor for its discount restaurant serviceTechCrunch, 2016techcrunch.com