All ears to the exclusive podcast with Vivek Kapoor, Co-founder at Dineout

About the guest

Vivek Kapoor is one of the co-founders at Dineout who’s responsible for Dineout’s multidimensional expansion in India and Abroad. He focuses on building relationships of great value with all his partner clients by keeping his ears close to the ground which makes it easy for him to think ahead of time. 

He dons various hats right from managing operations, to handling international expansion and spearheading sales. The “people person” trait makes him proficient in getting things rolling! He has over 10 years of experience in sailing with the British Petroleum, making him a master in tackling multiple operations. Choosing to leave a flourishing career in Merchant Navy to start his own successfully running venture, Dineout – India’s leading table reservation platform makes him an avid risk-taker.

About the company

Dineout is India’s largest dining out platform, as is popularly known! However, most of us, outside of the restaurant industry are unaware that they are also leading tech solution providers for restaurants. The platform currently serves in 20+ cities with 50,000+ partnered restaurants, 40 Mn+ diners and collective savings of more than $100 Mn on restaurant bills annually. 

The gist of the Dineout POdcast

In this podcast episode with Vivek, we got the opportunity to discuss Dineout’s journey from how the business goals evolved, how the focus of the business moved from B2C to B2B, the dynamics with which the leaders evolve the product keeping in mind the business needs and most importantly the impact on business due to the unprecedented pandemic, the takeaways, future plans for Dineout and more.  

The journey

“Back in 2012, table reservation was a concept less practised by the majority of restaurants in India. With Dineout, we tried to create a behaviour change amongst the diners and restaurants. Over these years, we have emerged as India’s largest dining out platform” Vivek Explains.

Eventually, the brand innovated on providing options for paying direct bills, with which Dineout stepped up as complete dining out platform – starting from helping diners to explore restaurants, book a table, to pay digitally, and later submit feedback. 

In 2015, Dineout acquired Inresto with the vision to help restaurants achieve operational excellence. Over these years, our team has introduced many modules under the Inresto suite to fit the needs of the industry. 

Impact of Pandemic on business

We all know 2020 has been bad for the economy. However, 3 industries have had the maximum impact – F&B, Hotel, and the aviation industry.  And even amidst lockdown, the restaurants had little hope of going back to “normal” with unlock. There were a lot of speculations about the new way of dining out such as pax limitation at the restaurant, appropriate distance between tables, and regular hygiene audits.

During this time, Dineout introduced the concept of a contactless dining experience which would make it possible for restaurants to improve sales by making diners feel at ease while dining out.

Vivek talks about how innovation is the key to success. Dineout strives hard to evolve the product suite to meet the needs of the industry and this has helped the business grow during the challenging times of the pandemic.
As it looks to most of the Dineout users, the platform has, in fact, deeper roots in solving problems for restaurants, as Vivek states, “Dineout is like that iceberg. So much of us is underneath the water. ” Dineout buckled up as soon as the pandemic hit and started evolving products that would make it easy for restaurants to sustain business in the Covid times. Dineout launched complete contactless dining out a solution. 

Takeaways

Along with providing all the technology-driven solutions, Dineout has enabled restaurants with direct reservations and orders, without relying on aggregators. Thereby adding more revenue-generating options.

To know more about the insightful discussion, tune in to the podcast on Spotify Podcast, iTunes Podcast, and Google Podcast.

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