Chennai: From now-onwards, you may hesitate to order food as frequently as you did earlier. The heavy discounts that were luring you to order those favourite dishes may soon come to an end.
The National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) on Tuesday said that food aggregators have agreed to redesign their schemes to rein in deep discounts offered to customers.
"…all aggregators will rejig their features which will allow the restaurant-customer ecosystem to detox from addiction of deep-discounts that has crippled the industry," the NRAI statement said.
The idea of scoring a discount should make guests feel special and not give them a sense of beating the system. Discount is a privilege and not a right, it added.
The tussle between restaurants of food service aggregators like Zomato and Swiggy over discounts, commissions and alleged “market-distorting practices’ saw more than 1,000 restaurants logging out of FSAs recently. The restaurants’ association and the apex bodies of hotels and restaurants had been intervening to make peace between the two parties.
"Over the past two days, NRAI held extensive meetings with all restaurant aggregators and we were bemused to learn that the aggregators were promoting deep-discounts to stay competitive amongst each other," the association said.
"Moreover, as opposed to general perception, restaurants do not get any share of the proceeds that aggregators generate from guests as subscription fees," it added.
The NRAI and aggregators were in agreement that technology is the backbone to enable restaurant discovery and a friction-less experience to the guests.
