Eazydiner - Table Reservation
Su Mcdowall
As per recent media reports, Yuvraj Singh, via his VC fund YouWeCan, has invested an undisclosed amount in EazyDiner. With this move, Yuvraj will also be the brand ambassador of the app.
Founded in 2015 by Vir Sanghvi and other top hoteliers, EazyDiner is a restaurant table reservation platform. The app allows users to book reservations in eight Indian cities and Dubai. Currently, the app has about 53,000 restaurants listed on the platform. EazyDiner claims to have 15 Lakh unique subscribers every month.
At the time of launch, it was reported that EazyDiner had also roped in several eminent people in its advisory council like Oberoi Group Joint MD Vikram Oberoi, The Leela Palaces MD Dinesh Nair, Speciality Restaurants founder & CEO Anjan Chatterjee, among others.
As per Inc42 Datalabs, 50 foodtech startups raised $152.3 Mn funding (till June 2016). Of the total 105 foodtech startups, 76% were early-stage. Of these, only 24% survived that stage and were able to raise Series A and Series B funding. In January 2016, Zomato also launched its table reservation service Zomato Book. Dineout is another player in this segment in India, apart from Eazy Diner.
The team decided to incentivise the consumer to change this behaviour. Incentives are in the form of meal enhancers like a free dessert or starter or a dish, which also add to the total offering of the EazyDiner free for anyone to use.
Speaking of their tie-up, Nikhil Ganju, Country Manager, TripAdvisor India, says TripAdvisor empowers users with insights to make informed travel choices with a high level of confidence that they will have a positive experience.
Integration is also being launched on Google Maps and Google Explore; an official announcement from Google is likely in July. This will enable users to search and explore restaurants through EazyDiner.
The platform currently has different stores of revenue. Restaurants pay EazyDiner for every diner that books a table; there are also advertisements, and a prime subscription model, which guarantees minimum 25 percent and up to 50 percent discount at over 1,400 restaurants in India and Dubai.
The restaurant and table booking space has seen booming activity in the past year. Zomato became another player in the segment with the acquisition of the US-based NexTable, a restaurant reservations and table-management platform. The new service is called Zomato Book.
EazyDiner is an instant restaurant table booking platform founded in 2014 by a collective group of renowned and highly experienced chefs and hoteliers across the world. EazyDiner offers table reservations at 6000+ registered restaurants in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Goa, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Lucknow, and Dubai on the EazyDiner app and website with guaranteed offers.
Integration was the most important part of the process as nothing moves forward unless the right channels, events, and platforms (like Google Analytics, CRM, etc.) are integrated into the marketing automation platform. So the EazyDiner team wanted to complete the integration process soon and without much hassle. But due to their past experience with other marketing platforms, they were skeptical about whether we will provide a simple process and adequate support.
Based on the use-cases mentioned above, EazyDiner wanted a no-frills and quick campaign execution that also helps them save their human hours. They aimed at having their integration done in such a manner that it helps them plan and execute their campaigns easily and strategically.
The managers then found the ins and outs of EazyDiner and promised an initial go live with a handful of use cases. So that EazyDiner can actually see if the integration is working fine and as expected. The onboarding manager also laid out a Scope of Work (SOW) which sets things clear and brings both the teams on the same page.
We mutually chalked out an onboarding plan that included deadlines for every particular thing. This helped in achieving the onboarding milestones and sticking to the turn-around-time (TAT). The onboarding expert broke down the integration process into a four-week process.
Along with the integration manuals, product tutorials, documentation, and educational emails, our onboarding manager played a proactive role in ensuring and aiding the EazyDiner team at every stage of integration. The manager provided one-to-one training and assistance.
We have a progress meter for each function of integration. The color of the success meters for every function changes from red to orange to green as the integration progresses from undone to in process to completed respectively.
Before switching to WebEngage, the EazyDiner team was unsure about associating with us for an optimum period. They had their concerns and challenges to be taken care of. One of the biggest concerns was product integration. The onus, as a solution provider, was on us to handle their concerns and solve their challenges.
Deploying a dedicated onboarding manager transformed the entire onboarding experience for EazyDiner. The hassle-free integration process, live updates, one-to-one product training, and timed processes fostered our relationship with the EazyDiner team. Today EazyDiner communicates with over 7 lakh users via our marketing automation dashboard and has been seeing commendable conversions.
Urban Pind's floors were deserted at 8.30 pm when the table was reserved. It did get populated, though, much later in the night. But, EazyDiner managed two things - one, helped in the restaurant's discovery and two, generated demand when there was excess capacity.
That was one of the ideas behind EazyDiner. While it was incorporated in 2014, its website went live in January 2015 - a time when all sorts of food-tech start-ups bloomed, raised capital, expanded in multiple cities, pushed app downloads, and burnt venture money fast delivering food at steep discounts. EazyDiner, modelled around OpenTable of the US, aimed to do the opposite. It wanted to get people to visit restaurants.
On average, about 20 per cent of the seats in a restaurant go vacant daily. On weekdays, this number shoots up to 50-55 per cent, says Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of EazyDiner, Rohit Dasgupta. There was a clear need in the market that the company tried to plug. Of course, the food and beverage pie is large, pegged at about $48 billion. The dine-out market is comparatively small. While Indians dine out less than twice a month, Indonesians eat out 15 times a month, Singaporeans 40 times and the Chinese, 60 times. A higher disposable income is expected to boost the appetite for dining out in India, and EazyDiner fancies riding on this trend.
"EazyDiner was set up to solve one key problem: to help diners make reservations at restaurants, and for restaurants to be able to offer and take bookings," says Deepak I. Shahdadpuri, Founder & Managing Director, DSG Consumer Partners, an investor in the company. "This business model is an established one globally among leading companies including OpenTable, LaFourchette (acquired by TripAdvisor), Dimmi (acquired by TripAdvisor), Chope and Quandoo. The millennial consumer is demanding a seamless digital experience. Given that there was no one offering real-time restaurant reservations in India, I worked with Vir Sanghvi and Rohit to start EazyDiner," Shahdadpuri adds.
Apart from Sanghvi, a journalist and well-regarded food critic, who brought in content expertise, the founding team comprised a blend of executives from the hospitality industry. Dasgupta was a General Manager with Oberoi Hotels & Resorts in his last role; Co-founder Shruti Kaul, Vice President marketing, has over a decade's experience at hotels, while Sachin Pabreja, Vice President of operations, held leadership positions with hotels such as Grand Hyatt, The Imperial and The Claridges, New Delhi. Ruchika Dhamija, Chief Product Officer, and Manish Kutaula, technology head, complete the founding team. It was, perhaps, the experience of the founding team that helped the company opt for slow and steady growth, over a super-fast, cash-guzzling model.
By the end of 2015, the food-tech world resembled a burnt toast. Here's a re-cap: Restaurant aggregator TinyOwl scaled back operations in many cities and fired employees. Zomato and Foodpanda let go of at least 300 people each. In Bangalore, food-tech firm Dazo shut shop. SpoonJoy, a company with investors such as Sachin Bansal and the backing of SAIF Partners, got sold to hyper-local grocery and fresh-food delivery company Grofers. Most venture capitalists switched off from the sector.
Nevertheless, EazyDiner, with an overall funding of $4 million from DSG Consumer Partners and Saama Capital, managed to sail through. It currently has 1,400 restaurants on its platform in five cities - Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai, and has, thus far, reserved tables for 1,26, 000 diners. Revenues are flowing. It made close to Rs 1 crore in May 2016 and achieved an operational break-even in Delhi, its first market.
Multiple revenue streams were built into the business model. Restaurants advertise on EazyDiner as also pay for every diner who books and dines. Currently, the start-up charges Rs 150 from five-star restaurants for every diner and Rs 75 from a standalone restaurant. The bulk of its current revenues, however, is generated through advertising. A third revenue stream will open up soon. The company is integrating cashless payments - it would handle the billing process for restaurants and a percentage would be charged as fees.
The business became less cash-sucking because it did not discount meals. Instead, the company persuaded restaurants to dole out freebies, called 'meal enhancers', to attract diners. "Not a single deal for a meal enhancer is funded by EazyDiner," Dasgupta asserts. This appears to be working for restaurants in some cases, leading to higher sales. Kapil Chopra, President of The Oberoi Group and a board member at EazyDiner, says that 72 per cent of the people who get a glass of wine free when booking through EazyDiner order a second glass. "This is not only at The Oberoi and Trident Hotel, but an overall average across restaurants," he informs. Close to 2,000 diners come to different restaurants at The Oberoi and Trident Hotels every month through EazyDiner, and this number is growing at 30 per cent every month, the hotel says.
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