Zomato has decided to make “contactless dining” a free service for its restaurant partners in India, as well as in the UAE, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Portugal, Philippines, Indonesia, and Lebanon for six months. The move comes in a a bid to support the restaurant businesses at this time of health and economical crisis in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic.
Contactless dining for restaurant goers comes with three main features - contactless menu surfing, contactless ordering and contactless payments. The feature would allow diners to simply scan a QR code to browse through the restaurant menu and facilitate online payments without having to exchange currencies or cards.
“Zomato Contactless Dining is going to be an important safety net – for restaurants as well as diners to minimise 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,” Deepinder Goyal, CEO, Zomato explained on in a series of posts on Twitter.
With the latest decision, Zomato allows restaurant partners in the named countries to only bear the payment transaction fee per order, for which the online food app would not charge any fee.
“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,” the Zomato CEO added.
Zomato, which claims to be present in over 10,000 cities, working with 1.4 million restaurant partners globally, acquired American cab hailing major Uber’s India-based food delivery business in an all-stock transaction in January.
Currently, the platform is making the lives of locked down Indians easier by facilitating doorstep grocery delivery amid the Covid-19 outbreak.