Reflecting on our first Restaurant Week

Apologies for not posting this earlier, but we’ve had to take a bit of a breather, which was followed by several review meetings with restaurants and a long, hard look at feedback.

Overall, it is safe to say that the inaugural Restaurant Week has been very successful. Our aim was to establish the concept for both customers and restaurants and we feel it has been understood and appreciated. There was plenty of interest shown, but more importantly this interest was translated into real reservations and meals. Given this, we are confident that we should have more Restaurant Weeks in Mumbai as well as other cities and we hope for your support in making it successful each time.

Love stats? Well, this website received over 6,000 unique visitors who each spent an average of 5:22 minutes; we managed to con over 810 of you to become fans on Facebook. Over 1,100 users registered to make a booking, 635 of you had confirmed reservations (of which 433 tables turned up) and 1,307 people dined during the week. 154 of you filled in our Feedback forms (Thank you!) and 72% thought their meal was either great or good. 71% had never dined at that restaurant before and based solely on the Restaurant Week meal, 53% would dine again at that restaurant while 25% said maybe. Last statistic - 86% will participate in Restaurant Week next year (yay!).

This is the first time such a concept has been executed, so there were a few glitches and we apologise - we hope next year will be smoother. Although most people were not affected, a small percentage had issues verifying their email addresses. Additionally, due to a glitch in the verification software, there were a few instances when we were overbooked. We did all we can to get you that table, but sadly we had to call a handful of you to tell you your confirmation was done in error and we apologise for this. Other than that, very few of you went through our blog for menus or FAQs - we will make these more prominent next year.

From our point of view, our main worry is in reducing the no-shows - people who have confirmed reservations and either cancel at the last minute or do not turn up at all. While our ratio of confirmed vs actual is roughly in line with industry standards, it isn’t fair to those on the wait list that you tell us so late that we cannot call anyone up to go in your place. Simply not turning up is just out of order. Any suggestions from a consumer point of view?

All in all, it has been a wonderful week for us and we have already started planning two Restaurant Weeks for early next year. We would like to thank all of you for your support and hope it will be a bigger and better Restaurant Week the next time around.

Toodles!