After pausing Pro Plus in May, Zomato trying to make loyalty programme more dine-in focussed

After pausing new subscriptions to its Pro Plus loyalty programme in May, Zomato is working in-house to make the membership more dine-in friendly. One of the reasons for the earlier version not taking off was its departure from more restaurant dine-in benefits to having online food ordering benefits, according to sources aware of the developments.

“The Pro Plus membership plan was very food delivery focussed. With the fear of subsequent Covid lockdowns out of the way, the plan is to make it more dine-in friendly,” said a person aware of the developments.

Zomato did not respond to Moneycontrol’s queries on the matter till the time of publishing.

Talking about the loyalty programme, Zomato CFO Akshant Goyal had said in the company’s Q4 earnings report, “Resurgence of Covid right at the beginning of the quarter and the resultant lockdowns again set the restaurant industry back from the progress they had made in the previous quarter as customers avoided eating at restaurants.”

“We are working on a product update here and aiming for profitable scale-up this year,” he added.

Once launched, the new programme will be Zomato’s fourth iteration of its loyalty programme in the last few years. Before launching Pro Plus last year, Zomato had introduced Pro in 2020 which replaced the original Zomato Gold membership programme.

While Gold was focussed on discounts for dine-in at restaurants, Pro came with added benefits like priority deliveries and discounts on food orders.

In 2019, the Gurugram-based company had to put a pause on its Infinity Dining programme after it faced flak from restaurants across India.

At the time, over 2,000 restaurants in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Goa, Pune, Gurgaon and Vadodra had exited platforms including Zomato, EazyDiner, Nearbuy, MagicPin and Gourmet Passport under a #Logout campaign, claiming that "unsustainable" deep discounting offered by the aggregators and table reservation services was hurting their business models.

In August last year, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal said that the company’s loyalty programme had a total of 1.8 million users – 400,000 more than the pre-pandemic number of 1.4 million in October 2019.

Meanwhile, Zomato’s arch-rival Swiggy has also stepped up its efforts to capitalise on restaurant dine-ins with its acquisition of Dine Out from Times Internet in May.

“There are plans to integrate Dine Out with the Swiggy One membership to tie in everything from food ordering and restaurant dine-in to grocery deliveries,” said a person close to the developments.

According to industry players, the biggest challenge for Zomato will be to integrate grocery deliveries through Blinkit with its loyalty programme. The food delivery major announced last month that it will acquire Blinkit (erstwhile Grofers) for $570 million.

Zomato has said that it may experiment with a unified loyalty programme with Blinkit after the acquisition goes through.