Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal on Tuesday said that the company will make its ‘contactless dining’ free for all restaurants in nine markets, including India, for at least six months.
Zomato recently announced ‘contactless dining’ that aims to minimise customer contact with anything that someone else might have touched at restaurants and includes components such as contactless menu, contactless ordering and contactless payments.
“To help the restaurant industry financially, we have decided to make Zomato Contactless Dining free (except payment gateway fee) for all restaurants across India, UAE, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Portugal, Philippines, Indonesia, and Lebanon for at least six months,” Mr. Goyal tweeted.
He added that this will inevitably exert significant pressure on Zomato’s own finances, “ but, I am sure we will survive if the restaurant industry does well. We are all in this together.”
Mr. Goyal said safety and hygiene were going to be of paramount importance for the restaurant industry for at least a couple of years and for the sake of industry’s reputation, the company is gearing up to help the restaurant community pull all stops and ensure customer and staff safety.
“Once the lockdown starts easing, 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 added, stating that 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 minimise the probability of spread of COVID-19 at public dining spaces,” he said.
The Hindu