1,200 restaurants delist themselves from dine-in programmes of Zomato, EazyDiner & others across India

NEW DELHI: The face-off between restaurant companies and aggregators escalated on Friday, with more than 1,200 restaurants in several major Indian cities delisting themselves from the dine-in programmes of services like Zomato, which said the exits could be “anti-competitive and illegal”.
These restaurants in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Goa, Pune and Vadodra exited platforms including Zomato, EazyDiner, Nearbuy, MagicPin and Gourmet Passport under a #Logout campaign, claiming that “unsustainable” deep discounting offered by the aggregators and table reservation services was hurting their business models.

Meanwhile, Zomato in a blog post addressed to restaurants, questioned the #Logout campaign and some of the proposals being considered by industry groups. “We have noticed, among others, active discussions on price-fixing and limiting the supply of services, which could constitute cartelisation. We urge you to be careful and not get involved in any such discussions,” it said.

“The #Logout movement started in Gurgaon two days back has turned into a nationwide one, which just shows how restaurants across the entire spectrum have been suffering from the deep-discount epidemic,” said National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) president Rahul Singh.

In emails sent to restaurant partners, Zomato has asked for 45 days’ notice if they planned to exit and pay a sign-up fee per restaurant if they wanted to join back.

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.”