Category: Restaurants

Beacons for Restaurant Order Apps

A growing number of restaurant ordering apps, such as Voolsy, use Bluetooth beacons to determine location.

Voolsy detects restaurants through iBeacons, lets customers explore digital menu, customize their order and place it with just a few taps across thousands of locations. Voolsy reduces your waiting time to get attention of waiter from minutes to seconds

Voolsy supports both ordering and payment for retail locations such as restaurants, food courts or cinemas using beacons. It also provides Voolsy cashback and other exclusive offers from partnered restaurants.

Restaurant of the Future

With restaurants and pubs here in the UK scrambling to reopen this weekend, they need to find ways to provide self-service and minimise contact with staff. It’s interesting to see what was considered a ‘future restaurant’ in 2014 makes much more sense today:

The concept restaurant at Eggcellent in Tokyo used iBeacons for the location aspects together with smartglasses, augmented reality and gesture interfaces. An Engadget article covered the restaurant in more detail.

Read about Using Beacons in Hospitality

Beacons are a Technology, not the Solution

There’s an interesting app/service called Voolsy, in India, that uses iBeacons to enable a slick restaurant mobile app. The key thing here is that beacons are mentioned just once on their web pages. The emphasis is, instead, on making the dining experience “enriched, hassle free and smooth”.

Take a look at your current and proposed beacon based solution and see if you can remove almost all references to beacons and instead concentrate on the problem being solved for your users. That way you are more likely to engage customers and less likely to alienate them with what’s, to them, incomprehensible technology. Beacons are an enabling technology, not the solution.