Zomato brings back 'Gold' in fourth iteration of loyalty programme

Zomato disabled its 10-minute food delivery service after it struggled to grow

Zomato has reintroduced its 'Gold' loyalty programme with a focus on food delivery at an introductory price of Rs 149 for three months. It will also enable users to avail of discounts for dining in at restaurants.

Customers who were subscribed to the company's previous loyalty programme called Pro Plus, which was suspended in 2021, will also be given a complimentary subscription to Gold for the first three months.

The new programme will be Zomato’s fourth iteration of its loyalty programme in the last few years. Before launching Pro Plus in 2021, 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 July, Moneycontrol reported Zomato was trying to make its loyalty programme more focused on dine-in, after which the foodtech platform paused Pro Plus.

Moneycontrol reported on January 23 that Zomato disabled its 10-minute food delivery service as it was struggling to find ways to grow the service.

In 2019, the Gurugram-based company had to put a pause on its Infinity Dining programme after it faced flak from restaurants across India.Over 2,000 restaurants across 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, 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.

“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 development.

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 has said it may experiment with a unified loyalty programme with Blinkit (which it acquired in 2021 for $570 million).