Eatigo turns restaurant bookings into a chance to gobble up discounts

If there’s anything that exemplifies the idea of being spoiled for choice, it’s the wealth of restaurants across cities like Bangkok and Singapore. Despite all those great foodie options, many restaurants are largely empty apart from during peak times. A group of entrepreneurs based in Thailand decided to tackle the whole issue with Eatigo.

It’s a site that offers both discovery and discounts to people looking to eat. Users can make bookings at the listed restaurants and cafes at allotted times and get discounts of, on average, 30 percent – or as much as 50 percent if you book at off-peak times, such as before or after the usual lunchtime rush.

In order to remove as many barriers to usage as possible, you don’t need to make any payments or get any coupons through the app. Instead, Eatigo users just make a simple booking and then later pay at the restaurant in the normal way – along with the discount you’ve nabbed by using the site or app.

Michael Cluzel, one of six co-founders at Eatigo, calls the startup an “anti-Groupon” – not in that it’s against daily deals, but in the sense that it’s doing things in a way that’s a lot more efficient than Groupon and all those other deals sites. He explains that Eatigo removes the barriers to users trying new places, and also it doesn’t send discounted customers at the restaurant’s busy times. “Deals take up space at peak times,” Cluzel adds. In this way, Eatigo is doing what airlines and hotels have been doing for years, and applying it to restaurants.

Eatigo’s Michael Cluzel

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Launched last summer, Eatigo now has listings in Singapore as well as the Thai cities of Bangkok and Pattaya. More major cities will be added soon.

Today, the Eatigo team is at our Tech in Asia Singapore 2015 event, pitching the business to the judges in the Startup Arena. After a five-minute pitch, the judges asked a series of tough questions about viability and other technicalities, which Cluzel responded to in detail. Once such concern from the judges was whether Eatigo’s focus on discounts would bring in rather stingy users, which would prove off-putting to merchants, especially high-end ones like five-star hotels. However, the startup team replied by saying that any differences in average spending among Eatigo’s users compared to the restaurant’s regulars was negligible.