Zomato waives reservation fees from restaurants

NEW DELHI: Online restaurant guide and food ordering firm Zomato today said the company has decided to waive fees from the restaurants accepting table reservations through it.

The company had last month decided to forgo commissions charged from around 70 per cent of restaurants on food orders placed through Zomato.

"Retrospectively from June 1, 2017 onward, our restaurant partners will not need to pay a 'per cover' fee or even a platform fee to accept seamless digital table reservations from Zomato. Yes, the service will be completely free," Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said in a blog post.

Last month, the company hit a milestone of one million reservations through its table reservations service, he added.

"The table reservations service is enabled for a tad more than 10,000 restaurants in four countries across the world," Goyal said.

Zomato looks forward to continue to deeply integrate with more restaurants across the countries of its presence and bring great experiences to diners, he added.

"With this change in fee structure, we are expecting that more restaurants start accepting online reservations from Zomato, and also not switch off their reservation slots during peak hours on weekends," Goyal said.

This shift comes in wake of Zomato saying in September that it had turned profitable.

"Zomato is now a profitable company. Yes, throughout the 24 countries where we operate, and across all our businesses, we are starting to make money," Goyal had said in the blog post at that time.

The company's core advertising business in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, its three key regions, is generating enough cash to cover for the millions of dollars of investments the firm is making into the rest of the regions and new businesses, he had added.