Zomato not to charge restaurants for ‘contactless dining’ for 6 months

Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal on Tuesday said that the company has made its ‘contactless dining free for all restaurants across India and other global destinations for a period of at least six months.

Restaurants in India, the UAE, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Portugal, Philippines, Indonesia, and Lebanon will have to only bear the payment gateway fee and Zomato won't charge any fee from them.

According to Goyal, the move is to help the restaurant industry financially in these tough COVID-19 lockdown times.

"This will inevitably exert significant pressure on our own finances, but I am sure we will survive if the restaurant industry does well. We are all in this together," tweeted Goyal.

After contactless delivery to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, foodtech unicorn Zomato last week announced "contactless dining" feature to help restaurants increase trust and confidence of customers in their safety and hygiene measures in a post-lockdown world.

Contactless dining has three main components, contactless menu, contactless ordering and contactless payment.

With a contactless menu, diners will be able to scan a QR code on the table to explore the restaurant menu with dish and pairing recommendations. The Zomato app will also enable contactless ordering and payment.

"Zomato ‘contactless dining' is going to be an important safety net – for restaurants as well as diners to minimize human contact. It is not the only solution, but one of the must haves in order to minimize the probability of spread of COVID-19 at public dining spaces,' said Goyal.

He added that once the lockdown starts easing up and diners start trickling into restaurants again, "we cannot let lack of caution lead to a stray incident and derail the industry's reputation".

"We have to use abundant caution to save the efforts of millions of people that restaurants employ," he said.

Zomato said it is building additional features on the app -- such as the ability to order multiple courses, and the option to pay for self or the entire table -- to ensure a hassle-free dining experience.