India’s Online Restaurant Guide Zomato To List Events, E-commerce To Follow

One of India’s largest food and restaurant guides, Zomato, has now introduced an “Events” section to reposition itself from the existing food-only brand to a premium lifestyle brand.

For those who don’t know, Zomato, previously known as Foodiebay.com, was launched in July 2008 as an online food and lifestyle guide. It has since expanded its services to 18,000 restaurants in ten cities in the country including Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh over a span of three years, with more cities like Kochi in the pipeline. With a million monthly visitors spread across these ten cities, Zomato claims to be the largest food and lifestyle portal in the country.

The events section currently showcases 250+ upcoming events ranging across various categories like arts and literature, music and dance, food and drink, entertainment in a visually rich interface, similar to its restaurant section. You can find out events happening in the city by date, location and timing, category and keyword search.

If you are interested in any event listing, you can further view its details and similar events happening nearby. One of the features which I thought was cool was the ability to view all the restaurants nearby to the event place, which can come in handy, if you go to an event with your friends and want to hang around later for lunch/dinner.

The events homepage also features popular events, recommended events along with a side widget listing the week’s event agenda and a large dark grey button to submit events for inclusion to Zomato events. While the events are currently limited to the Delhi-NCR region, the company told Penn Olson that it will be rolled out to Mumbai and Bangalore shortly.

Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO, Zomato.com said:

It’s been a while since we have been serving our huge customer base by helping them make their eating out and nightlife choices. We have launched our Events section as we realize these are the same customers who would also like our services to help them choose their destinations to hang out and enjoy. Our focus has been user-centric and we are only including events, which makes sense to the end user. For example, if a restaurant is trying to pull off a marketing gimmick by calling a new dish in the menu an event, we have not put it in the section. We will be launching our events sections for Mumbai and Bangalore shortly and I’m confident they will all be very well received like all our offerings have been so far!

On his Twitter account, he also said that Zomato team is building a e-commerce section to the portal right now, although he didn’t divulge any specific details about it. We assume this will serve as an online ticket booking platform for events and possibly even restaurant bookings, after all it had rejected the idea of online ordering, earlier this year, citing several issues with it.