Meet the start-up with an airline-style method to fill up restaurant seats with more diners

When American Airlines pioneered charging passengers different air fares in the 1970s, the carrier drove up profits and helped revolutionise the industry. In Thailand, technology start-up Eatigo wants to replicate that innovation in the restaurant sector.

Eatigo, founded in 2013 by four ex-telecommunications industry professionals from Thailand, Singapore, India and Germany, is in the business of helping restaurants fill up empty tables by offering discounts to diners at different times of the day via its mobile app.

“The restaurant industry is worth US$2.6 trillion and it’s a market that’s absolutely huge, and yet it operates at a capacity of about 30 per cent,” said Eatigo co-founder and co-chief executive Michael Cluzel in an interview on the sidelines of last week’s Techsauce Global Summit in Bangkok, Thailand.

“If we can increase capacity by just 10 percentage points to 40 per cent, that’s an incremental market size of US$600 billion. It’s an absolutely green field, a blue ocean of opportunity.”

Eatigo treats each restaurant seat as a perishable good, just like an empty airline seat, according to Cluzel. He said fixed costs, such as rent and staff expenses, are incurred each hour that a restaurant seat is left vacant. Most restaurants typically have a period of inactivity during the day, which means these businesses are not operating efficiently.