An article in Startup Daily today, has announced the entrance of yet another Restaurant Booking system into Australia, Qandoo, an online booking company out of Germany. They evidently launched in Sydney last week with 50 customers.
What is the Quandoo Business Model?
We don’t have any details yet about the Quandoo business model, so it will be interesting to see what the experience is for the Restaurant owner. It looks like they charge the restaurant for bookings so it will be interesting to see they talk about Yield Utilisation, which is generally sending out discounts to their email list for restaurants that are struggling. It will be important to see if Restaurants get a copy of the email addresses of their customers or if Quandoo keeps that secret.
By not collecting your customers email address, you lose the quickest way of managing your own yield. Building an email database is a critical success factor for many great Restaurant businesses. Make sure the online booking system you use does not gives you the customer email address and doesn’t share it with anyone else. It is not certain yet if Quandoo provides email addresses.
Quandoo is headed up in Australia by Paul Hadida, who according to Linkedin, was a Sales Manager at Yumtable for 4 months after moving from Eat Now where he was the National Sales Manager at Eat Now for 8 months.
How will Quandoo perform in Australia?
It will be interesting to see what happens with Quandoo, whether they will be able to compete with Tripadvisor under the Dimmi brand, Book A Restaurant, Zomato, Yumtable and our own Free Online Restaurant Booking System, (FROLO). Restalo tried and failed last year, and that was before Open Table, Zomato and Yumtable entered the market. In that time as well, our FROLO system has booked 165,000 seats and growing every day.
Quandoo, according to Techcrunch has raised $39.95 million US in 5 Rounds from 7 Investors. This is really telling about the importance of great execution, with Dimmi being rumoured to have sold for just $25 million to Tripadvisor, after raising $10,000,000 from Telstra and Village Roadshow. Dimmi had failed to grow their customer data base in Australia and was forced to transition to becoming a reseller of the excellent table management system, Resdiary.
The one other interesting question that is doing the rounds is what is Open Table up to? Did they get gazumped by Tripadvisor in trying to buy Dimmi? Are they looking to purchase another booking company, maybe Book A Restaurant? They have been in Australia for a long time now, without any announcement, but I guess we will all find out in good time.
If you are looking for a Free Restaurant Online Booking System that doesn’t charge per seat or per table and allows you to take bookings on your own website without taking your customers contact details, check out our FROLO. It is quick and simple. You can start saving money today!
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Is Poor SEO Killing Your Restaurant?
Too many times we see customers with websites that are costing restaurants thousands of dollars every month through poor design, poor messaging and poor SEO. If your website could be improved to bring in 200 extra visits per month and just 10% of those made a booking, and each booking was for 2.5 seats on average at $50 a seat, you would have an extra $2,500 in revenue a month. A 30% food cost, that is $1,750 in profit extra a month. This ignores those customers coming back as regulars – which is more profit.
Remember, if these customers aren’t finding your Restaurant, they are finding your competitors.
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