Why not launch a hospitality app during lockdown

Australia's restaurants may be gripped by the biggest downturn in living memory, more than half of Australian hospitality workers may have lost their jobs, but the coronavirus pandemic isn't stopping the New York-based hospitality software company SevenRooms setting up shop in Australia.

The software-as-as-service (SaaS) company, which provides a soup-to-nuts reservation, wait-list, ordering and customer management platform for major restaurant chains in the US, says it's hunting for real estate in Sydney and hiring staff so it can set up a regional headquarters.

And though there may be fewer restaurants operating in Australia than there used to be, it's hoping to sign them up as customers, too.

Levi Aron, the former CEO of Deliveroo Australia who's now the chief revenue officer at SevenRooms, said a lot of Australian restaurants had created problems for themselves when they turned to third-party service providers – a term which would surely include Deliveroo, though Mr Aron didn't point the finger at his former employer – in a desperate effort to stay afloat during the pandemic.

Outsourcing functions such as food delivery to companies such as Uber meant that restaurants often no longer had access to critical data about their customers at a time when they need that data more than ever, Mr Aron told The Australian Financial Review.

Without customers' email addresses or phone numbers, restaurants can't contact customers to let them know if they've been forced to temporarily close down due to a COVID-19 outbreak; without their delivery addresses, they can't target local customers with specials encouraging them to walk to the restaurant and pick up their online orders themselves; and without having table reservation data on the same platform as home delivery data, restaurants have no idea who their most loyal and lucrative customers are.

"Here in the US, we were closed down; our restaurants were closed, and they were only able to operate takeaway or delivery," Mr Aron said.

"But as the summer came on, what we found is that ... restaurants were opening up patios, here in New York they were opening up outside dining on the street, and so the restaurant owners themselves wanted to communicate to the customers who had been ordering delivery to let them know that (the restaurant) was now open.

"But many restaurants didn't have the ability to communicate that with their customers, because they didn't have that data. The third parties had it."

Which is where SevenRooms comes in, Mr Aron said.

For about $500 a month, the company is offering a single platform that replaces all the third party platforms and offers: online ordering for delivery and takeaway; table reservation and wait-listing; phone-based menus so restaurants don't need to constantly sanitise their printed menus; contactless ordering for customers who don't want wait staff to come near them; and even on-phone payment of the bill.

The SevenRooms app combines all that data to build detailed profiles of all diners, that can even be used for contact tracing. Not only will restaurants be able to tell who was there on a given night, they'll also know precisely what time they arrived, what table they sat at, and what time they left, Mr Aron said.