Malaysia is known for its melting pot of cultures and cuisine, thanks to its geographical location. Our eating behaviour has become quite the phenomenon and a culture on its own, showing up in popups of food and beverage outlets and businesses in busy urban streets.
With a presence in Bangkok, Pattaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, Eatigo recently joined the app fam in Malaysia with the mission to ‘Connect empty stomachs with empty tables’.
Eatigo allows us to reserve tables in a range of food and beverage outlets ranging from mid-range to high-end restaurants, even hotel buffets, for the lazy glutton in us.
With food delivery, concierge and restaurant reservation apps flooding the market, we do think that there are quite a few similarities between Eatigo, Tableapp and Offpeak, other deals and dining booking apps that already have a presence here. We did a comparison between these three platforms to see how they fare against each other in terms of what they have to offer.
Services
1. Eatigo:
Offers discounted restaurant reservations.
- Real-time discounts off the whole food bill daily
- Updated according to the current time, making it easier to browse.
2. Tableapp:
Tableapp is primarily a restaurant reservation platform but offers discounted prices for certain vendors. For example, when making a booking for Dining in The Dark through the platform, there is a 14% discount. On top of that, Tableapp offers a tailor-made event booking service where the team customises events for patrons ranging from:
- Company functions
- Product Launch
- Wedding Events
- Birthday Parties
3. Offpeak:
Has similar features to Eatigo, but users can also see what restaurants are trending and how many other bookings have been made for each vendor.
User Interface: At A Glance
1. Eatigo
Eatigo features a smart search engine that can predict the restaurant you want to look for with the first few letters. The outlets are grouped into categories like:
- Halal certified
- Hotel buffets
- Trending restaurants
The website also included a scrollable overview of the available discounts and their timeslots for individual restaurants. These are also divided by:
- Recommended
- Most reserved
- New on Eatigo
- A to Z
However, as a user, with the absence of reviews and the inability to click on the listed star rating as seen above, it’s unclear how restaurants are placed in the recommended list.
2. Tableapp
While pleasing to the eye, Tableapp’s homepage has limited features.
The app doesn’t maximise the organisation flow of its merchants as well as Eatigo does. They’re divided into:
- Most scenic restaurants
- Most romantic restaurants
- Most unique restaurants
- Best places for steak
- Best restaurants
- Popular restaurants
Like Eatigo, Tableapp doesn’t expand their categories with reviews, which makes us wonder how each restaurant gets grouped respectively.
3. Offpeak
Unlike Eatigo, the website doesn’t quite allow users to do a quick search. However, I am instantly informed which restaurants are preferred by other patrons as the website displays the number of bookings of each restaurant, validating their popularity.
Similarities
RED is the new black. Actually, it isn’t really a new concept. Considering why all sale signs or clearance signs are red, there’s a reason for why hues of red seem to be the dominating theme at first glance amongst all three contenders’ home pages.
A study showed that people react faster and more forcefully when they see the colour red. Retailers then use this information to grab a customer’s attention and cue them to take advantage of the discounts that are available.
Online Help Desk
1. Eatigo:
- Slightly slower response, but they were helpful in answering my queries.
- Eatigo goes offline without initiating a final signoff.
2. Tableapp:
- It’s a lot more personalised.
- Users are able to see who you’re speaking to with a picture preview.
- Conversation flow was extremely natural, informal yet helpful.
- Users aren’t required to fill in contact details before starting the chat; instead the customer service rep brought it up naturally in our conversation, citing possible connection issues as a reason.
3. Offpeak:
- I was greeted by my name, which was quite nice.
- The customer support that was provided also felt less robotic.
- In the team’s dealings with the customer service, the experiences seemed to vary greatly with who was servicing the chat.
Similarities
While none of the customer support provided immediate responses in my first attempt, the user experience seem to vary with different times. While difficult as it is operated by humans, perhaps the platforms could improve by streamlining the experience at all times.
Cancellation Policies
1. Eatigo: Users are able to cancel their booking at any time before the actual reservation time.
2. Tableapp: It’s the same policy as Eatigo, but some restaurants do have cancellation policies for pre-paid reservations. For example, users are required to pay a deposit in advance upon reservations and they may be taken anyway by the restaurant should you not show up.
3. Offpeak: Users are required to cancel 10 minutes before the dining time.
Similarities
Given the ability to cancel with quite late notice, these platforms seem to exist to keep patrons happy, as they understand that plans change.
Restaurant Choices
1. Eatigo: Mid-range to high-end restaurants, even hotel buffets.
2. Tableapp: More premium choices available, including Michelin-starred Babe restaurant.
3. Offpeak: They really reach out to the masses. From Insta-worthy restaurants to steakhouses and to high-end restaurants, they had a good range of places.
Similarities
None have many options in East Malaysia.
In summary, prices will vary depending on what you’re looking for.
These platforms have a smorgasbord of outlets that will be able to cater to your every need. Eatigo‘s cross-country reservation feature could help a vacation planning process holistically, which could be useful when we travel to Thailand and Singapore for a short break or even for work.
In future, I hope restaurants and these reservation apps will work towards becoming more inclusive in terms of dietary options. For example, explicitly displaying vegan options and allergy disclaimers.
However, it’s nice to see so many options popping up, and as consumers, we really don’t have much to lose from having all these made available to us through the three platforms.
As a quick overview, here is a combined table of their available features.
