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Online dining guide offers gift service
The Telegraph Journal, November 2, 2000
Cathy Taylor, director of administration for the Grannan Hospitality Group of Saint John, says her company sold eight gift certificates within 20 minutes of the launch of the DineAid.Com online
service.
TALI FOLKINS Telegraph-Journal FREDERICTON -
With the busy Christmas season looming on the horizon, a Fredericton online restaurant guide has launched a new virtual gift-certificate service. As of two weeks ago, DineAid.Com has been offering visitors to its site the chance to purchase gift certificates at hundreds of restaurants across the Atlantic provinces at the click of a mouse.
The idea originated after a number of requests last year by visitors to the site, says DineAid.Com president Wayne Jagoe. Last Christmas the owner of a large corporation needed 10 $50 gift certificates for his staff. He asked Mr. Jagoe if it was possible to order them online. Soon after, DineAid, he says, began to work on the concept.
The project took about eight months to develop, Mr. Jagoe says. With three parties involved - the customer, DineAid and the restaurant - a number of security and other issues had to be settled, so it required a considerable amount of homework. Some 20 per cent of the 4,300 restaurants listed on DineAid are now involved, and Mr. Jagoe plans to include 80 to 90 per cent of them eventually.
Gift certificates, especially at certain times of the year, can account for a significant portion of the sales in some restaurants. The Grannan Hospitality Group, which runs six restaurants in Saint John, finds that certificates make up about 10 to 15 per cent of its sales, says Cathy Taylor, the restaurant company's director of administration. The Grannan group sold eight gift certificates within 20 minutes of the launch of the online service, Ms. Taylor says.
Mr. Jagoe says he started DineAid four years ago "on the kitchen table," as a part-time project while he managed a Fredericton restaurant. Since then, the site, which lists all the restaurants he knows of in Atlantic Canada, has grown to require seven employees. It makes money, he says, through a combination of paid advertising space, fees for restaurants to post menus and promotional material and through licensing some of its content. DineAid takes 10 per cent of sales for the gift certificate service.
The site, he says, answers a demand for more information about an under-promoted topic. "Everybody thinks restaurants in Atlantic Canada are just burgers and fries and apple pie," he says.
DineAid.Com, he says, tends to appeal especially to frequent diners-out; more than half of its visitors say they eat out four or five times a week. Sixty-one per cent of its visitors are women - which is perhaps a good sign, since it seems women are the decision-makers when it comes to dining out. Mr. Jagoe says industry studies show that the decision to dine out is made by a woman 71 per cent of the time, and the choice of restaurant falls to a woman 75 per cent of the time.
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