A new app lets restaurants offer discounts of up to 50 percent to fill empty tables, with more than 250 venues signed up for its New Zealand launch.<\/p>\n
Restaurant discount app EatClub, part-owned by British chef Marco Pierre White, has launched in Auckland and Wellington, promising diners’ savings of up to 50 percent when venues have spare tables.<\/p>\n
More than 250 restaurants and cafes have joined the platform here, including eight Michelin-starred venues and names such as The French Cafe, Cassia, Cibo, KOL, Atelier and Dockside.<\/p>\n
Restaurants can post a live offer whenever they want to bring in more customers, choosing the discount, time and number of tables available.<\/p>\n
Diners claim an offer through the app and receive a straight percentage off everything they order.<\/p>\n
EatClub chief executive and co-founder Pan Koutlakis said the system could respond quickly to a quiet spell or a last-minute cancellation.<\/p>\n
“A restaurant in Sydney can have a cancelled booking, post an offer and have someone sitting in their restaurant in the next 20 or 25 minutes. It’s that live and that dynamic.”<\/p>\n
Customers pay using an EatClub digital card held in their phone’s wallet, which is linked to their usual debit or credit card.<\/p>\n
The discount is applied automatically when they pay, so there is no need to show a voucher or tell restaurant staff they are using a deal.<\/p>\n
Koutlakis said the app was designed to help restaurants make better use of quieter periods without cutting menu prices for everybody or changing the dining experience.<\/p>\n
Venues could schedule offers for traditionally slow times, such as late afternoon during the week, or put one up in real time if bad weather kept customers at home.<\/p>\n
He said high-end restaurants had also been receptive to the idea, despite the risk that discounting could be seen as denting their image.<\/p>\n
“This is actually something that our co-founder Marco Pierre White says often: the only thing that really devalues your brand is an empty restaurant.”<\/p>\n
White, a shareholder and adviser to EatClub, has been involved since before the product launched.<\/p>\n
The platform already operates in Australia and the United Kingdom, where it says it has more than three million users and 10,000 restaurants.<\/p>\n
It plans to expand into other New Zealand cities in the coming months.<\/p>\n
For now, the app’s offers are available only in Auckland and Wellington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new app lets restaurants offer discounts of up to 50 percent to fill empty tables, with more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-623313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}