Zomato offers to restructure Gold scheme but restaurants stick to guns

New Delhi: Online food ordering firm Zomato has reached out to restaurants again with its assurance to redesign the Gold scheme to limit the use by subscribers, a proposal that found little traction with eateries which termed it as a "knee-jerk" reaction to their log out campaign.

Refusing to budge on its stand on discounting schemes, industry body National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) said the restructuring of the Zomato Gold scheme would not resolve the key issue of deep discounts and its members will continue to stay logged out.

Around 2,000 restaurants have logged out from the dine-in programmes of Zomato and other platforms since last week, claiming that the deep discounting offers by food aggregators were hurting their business.

Zomato has shot off mass emails to its restaurant partners, outlining the steps it will take to limit the use of its Gold programme.

Zomato said it will limit the Gold usage by a single user to one unlock per day. This will ensure that customers complete their dining experience at a single restaurant, bringing the net effective discount down significantly.

The company also said it will restrict a user's login ID to a single mobile device at a time so that login sharing becomes impossible.

"Going forward we are going to restrict the number of unlocks to a max of two per table," the letter by the company's founder Deepinder Goyal said.

The online platform, however, urged them to enforce these steps from September 15 onwards for giving Zomato enough time to communicate to Gold customers.

The NRAI, which claims to represent around 6,000 member eateries and bars, termed Zomato's mass email as a knee jerk reaction.

"We are in receipt of the mass email sent out by Zomato to all member restaurants. This is a knee jerk reaction to the #logout movement and the meeting held yesterday between the founding team of Zomato and Management committee members of NRAI," the association said in a statement.

Zomato restructuring its gold scheme does not resolve the issue of deep discounting and NRAI members will continue to stay logged out, the body asserted.