Mass Exodus At Zomato: 8000 Hotels, Restaurants Quit Zomato Gold Over Illegal Kitchens, Steep Discounts

On 15^th August, over 300 restaurants registered under the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) in Gurgaon 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 delisted themselves from Zomato. Restaurants claim to have suffered heavy losses complying to the anytime, anywhere, any-day discounting behaviour by aggregators.

The most awe-striking action that took place here, was that amidst all the fresh and calamities, Zomato decided to launch its Gold Membership plan for food delivery, just like the one it has for dine-ins. After the boycott on dine-in, Zomato is now facing backlash on its delivery platform.

AHAR Unanimously Boycotts Zomato

Zomato is known for offering Gold Membership programme on dine-in restaurants that lets customers avail special benefits on food and drinks. This is highly being opposed by restaurants, as they claim to have suffered heavy losses complying to the anytime, anywhere, any-day discounting behaviour by aggregators.

Despite of all the resistance offered by a multitude of restaurants around the country, Zomato rolled out the Gold Membership plan for food delivery. The users have been constantly demanding to bring Gold to delivery. Zomato Gold on delivery offers offer consumers benefits such as 1+1 on food orders, with a maximum discount capped at Rs 300.

More & More Hotels Boycott Zomato

It is already known that the NRAI has been strongly resenting every step of Zomato’s traversal and has been supporting hotels and restaurants to log out from its platforms. Now, there has been an addition to this family.

The Indian Hotel and Restaurant Association (AHAR), which represents over 8,000 hotel and restaurant owners in Maharashtra, declared unanimously that it is discouraging members to opt for Zomato’s Gold on delivery platform with immediate effect, with alleged delivery from illegally-run kitchens, steep discounts offered for Zomato Gold members and unavailability of delivery executives.

AHAR hasn’t taken any decision on the Zomato Gold dining services as of now but have strongly shown its discontent over Zomato’s delivery services. They believe that there is no gain for hoteliers and it only benefits the food aggregator company.

The association also demands to let those restaurants service that hold legal mandatory licences and an end to alleged arbitrary commissions charged by Zomato and steep discounts which it said were loss-making proposition for restaurants.

When it was rolled out, Zomato had 13,000 restaurant partners who had signed up to be part of the Gold on delivery program. However later, a few hundred restaurants logged out of the platform’s Gold delivery service as they were incurring heavy losses.

AHAR has alleged that delivery commissions charged by Zomato go up to 22-25% and asked for a cap of 15% including GST, adding that the additional prices should be levied by the customers and not the hotels and restaurants, which are currently bearing the brunt of increased prices.