Eatigo, an online restaurant reservation platform, recently won the Global Brain Award and was second place in the Best Startups in the Region category from Tech in Asia Singapore 2015. The service, which requires no coupon printing and no credit card, works with more than 300 restaurants in Bangkok, Pattaya and Singapore, and has racked up more than 250,000 app downloads since being founded in 2013.
Michael Cluzel, co-founder and group chief exexcutive of Eatigo International.
Eatigo has adopted the "Yield Management" business model, which has been widely adopted in the hotel and airline industries where prices vary at different times. It seats over 50,000 people in listed restaurants during off-peak hours every month.
One of the six founders is Michael Cluzel, a French economist who likes to dub himself an "international gypsy" for having lived and worked in Europe, Africa, South America, the Caribbean and Asia. Life sat down with Cluzel, who currently serves as the Group CEO, to talk about the company's business, eating trends and plans for the future.
As the concept of yield management is rather new in the F&B industry, how do you let stakeholders know about this?
We need to acquire both restaurants and users. Acquiring good quality merchants that give good offers to users is actually the biggest challenge. Yield management is still new to the F&B industry and we need to educate restaurants on the benefits before they come on board. This makes sign up a bit slower but it ensures top quality restaurants and offers and is worth our time.
So that has led you to take advantage of off-peak hours. How does this concept actually enable Eatigo to function as a business?
What Eatigo does for the restaurant is "traffic shaping". We make customers come exactly when the restaurants want them to come in their off-peak hours and we do this by motivating customers to come at the desired times by offering discounts that change every 30 minutes. We convince users to come a bit earlier or a bit later than usual and everybody wins — the customer because he gets a very nice discount and the merchant because his capacity utilisation increases and so does his profitability.
Eatigo charges the merchants the same way a traditional table reservation platform does. We take a fee for every diner we send to a restaurant. In this way we make sure that the economic interest from the merchant and us is fully aligned. The only way we make money is by sending profitable traffic to the restaurant.
As Thai people don't usually make reservations when they eat out, how does Eatigo, a reservation platform, overcome this?
The answer is simple, by giving them a reason. Motivation in the form of a good discount is the key. There are maybe only three to four restaurants in Bangkok where it's actually necessary to make a reservation so Thailand does not have a reservation culture. But if you give customers a financial motivation, it works. Eatigo sends close to 90% of our customers to restaurants in off-peak times.
Is consumer behaviour in Thailand different from that of Singaporean people?
Thai users love to find their favourite restaurants by browsing around, exploring, not by searching and filling out forms. Singaporean users prefer to search for exactly what they want. This was a big challenge when it came to designing a user interface and user experience that allows both types of users to find what they want. Also Thai users prefer to book half a day to one day in advance while Singaporean users make reservations more in advance than their Thai peers.
Are there any differences between these two nations when it comes to their love for food?
Thai consumers tend to focus more on the food aspect while Singaporean consumers seem to place more importance on the atmosphere of a restaurant.
We noticed that by studying what pictures on the application drive the most reservations and there is a clear difference between Thailand and Singapore. Thai people seem to like Japanese and Thai food a lot and enjoy rooftop places with a good view. All you can eat type of buffets are very popular both in Thailand and Singapore.
I have heard that you want people to call Eatigo 'Anti-Groupon'. What does that really mean?
When we say you can call us the "anti-Groupon" or "anti-Ensogo", we do not mean this in a negative way such as "we are better" than these platforms.
We mean this in the sense that what we deliver to the merchants is the exact opposite of what social buying platforms like Groupon or Ensogo deliver. They deliver 80 to 90% of their diners in peak hours, we deliver 80 to 90% of our diners in off-peak hours.
We are opposites, not competitors, that is why we are the "anti-version".
How do you think the trend for using a reservation platform will change in the future?
We believe that across the globe restaurant online reservations will gain more and more acceptance and importance and that this will be driven by and expedited by a move from desktops to mobiles. Today already 80% of our reservations are happening on smartphones and that will only increase.
By adding more and more exciting merchants to our platforms and welcoming more and more users, our vision is that one day before making a decision on what to eat, people will always check what is available on Eatigo first.
