By Vikas SN and Nikhil Pahwa
Info Edge backed Zomato has launched ticket bookings for its events section with an initial focus on new year parties. The events section was launched in September 2011, catering to events in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune, and now claims to have ticketing for over 500 upcoming events across these cities, with around 175,000 tickets on offer at 30 venues in each. This, the company says, translates to over 40 crores of ticket inventory online, and it isn’t planning to charge any “convenience charge” to its customers.
By introducing an online ticketing platform, Zomato is now entering the events booking territory which is largely dominated by Bookmyshow.com, and given that the New Year parties attract significant interest, this would be a way of gauging demand for events among its (claimed) user base of 2 million visitors every month. But the thing to keep in mind is that those users are coming for its restaurant guide section, to which it intends to cross-sell event tickets. We wonder why Zomato hasn’t yet launched a table booking business, or online food orders like JustEat and Bookurtable since that would have been logical as well. Perhaps this is a precursor. Zomato claims to have listings for over 20,000 restaurants across 10 Indian cities and more than 10 Lakh monthly users.
