Revolt Against Food Apps Spread Pan-India, 1200 Restaurants Opt Out Of Zomato, NearBy, EazyDiner, Magic Pin; Zomato Appeals For Truce

We’d informed you just a couple of days back that over 300 restaurants, registered under the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) in the millennium city of Gurgram have decided to break their ties with aggregators and table reservation services, like Zomato, EazyDiner, Nearbuy, MagicPin and Gourmet Passport, under a special #Logout campaign.

In just about 3 days, more than 1,200 restaurants in several major cities across India have delisted themselves from the dine-in programmes of services like Zomato. Restaurants claim to have suffered heavy losses complying to the anytime, anywhere, any-day discounting behaviour by aggregators. With the implication of the situation, Zomato has through several tweets, requested the NRAI to go over the situation, hence calling for truce and sanity.

1200 Restaurants Across Major Cities Delisted Themselves from Zomato

Restaurants believe that the heavy discounting offers underlying by Zomato have deeply hurt their profitability but in order to stiff competition in the market, they were forced to participate. Unsustainable deep discounts and the table reservation services have hurt their business models.

Now, starting with around 300 restaurants in Gurgaon 3 days ago, about 1200 restaurants in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Goa, Pune, Gurgaon and Vadodara have called it quits with aggregators like Zomato, EazyDiner, Nearbuy, MagicPin and Gourmet Passport, under the #LogOut campaign.

Such unanimous step of a campaign and the multitude support it has received, show that restaurants across the entire spectrum have been suffering from the deep-discount epidemic.

What Does Zomato and Other Aggregators Have to Say?

Zomato comes up looking for a settlement. After 1200 restaurants single-handedly delisting themselves off the app, Zomato on Saturday said it is open to making modifications to rectify “mistakes” and appealed to restaurant owners to stop the #LogOut campaign.

Zomato then went on with a series of tweets, all looking out for truce and sanity. It said that it wants the restaurants and consumers to all feel like they are in a safe place, accepting that somewhere their plan didn’t go as designed and their methods were proved to be flawed, yet they consider this as a wake up call and plans to do 100x more for Indian restaurant markets and customers.

“We are committed to work with the industry and make modifications to Zomato Gold which will result in a win win situation for restaurants and consumers”, says Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal.

Even the table reservation firm Dineout cofounder and chief executive Ankit Mehrotra said in a statement: “Dineout is closely working with all its restaurant partners and NRAI to build not only a more viable consumer-facing platform where diners can discover the right restaurants and offers around them, but also to understand the restaurant’s technological needs and solve the same with the multiple B2B modules to optimise their revenues and costs better and improve their bottom line.”