Explained: What happens to your Zomato Pro membership as company discontinues programme

Food delivery aggregator Zomato has reportedly discontinued its premium membership programme called ‘Pro’. The app has closed new sign ups and stopped renewing the loyalty subscription.Over the last few days, Zomato Pro Help Twitter handle informed its followers that the programme was discontinued. It should be noted that the company had previously shut down the more premium iteration Zomato Pro Plus.What is Zomato Pro?The members-only programme assured faster food delivery on priority and also plenty of savings with big and exclusive discounts.According to The Indian Express, the Gurgaon-based company had launched Zomato Pro in 2020 and Zomato Pro Plus in 2021. Before the Pro programme, there was Zomato Gold membership.Zomato’s rival Swiggy continues to offer its loyalty programme, Swiggy One, which was launched in November last year. There are two memberships offered under Swiggy One priced at Rs 299 for three months and Rs 899 for a year. Swiggy’s loyalty program offers unlimited free deliveries from select restaurants and unlimited free delivery from Instamart on orders higher than Rs 99. It also removes any surge charges.What is next for Zomato?From its Twitter handle, it appears the company is working with its restaurant partners to come up with a new programme. According to a report by The Indian Express, a Zomato spokesperson said, “While Zomato Pro and Pro Plus have been loved tremendously by our customers and merchants, we want it to be even more beneficial, especially for the most engaged customers and merchant partners.”He added that the active member will continue to get the benefits of their membership, however, they will not be able to extend or renew it once it expires. “We are taking feedback and working closely with our customers and restaurant partners to craft a new program. Meanwhile, we are not onboarding new members and merchant partners to Zomato Pro and Zomato Pro Plus. While active members can continue to get their benefits as promised, they will not be able to extend/renew their memberships once their membership tenure expires,” the spokesperson added.Why has Zomato cancelled the Pro program?In a bid to narrow its losses, Zomato is looking to introduce newer use cases for its app, focused more on dining out. The Indian Express reported that the recent decisions are in line with Zomato’s new strategy of looking beyond loyalty programmes to drive customer frequency. “I think if you have to go from where we are today and meaningfully increase customer frequency, we will have to look beyond these loyalty programmes and look at introducing newer use cases, which perhaps leads to a lot of the current offline spend on restaurant food moving on to our platform,” Zomato’s chief financial officer Akshant Goyal said in its earnings call for the April-June quarter earlier this month. The company reported a consolidated net loss of Rs 186 crore for the three-month period ended June, compared with Rs 359.70 crore in the March quarter and Rs 360.70 crore in the quarter ended June 30, 2021. This, even as its topline grew to Rs 1,413.90 crore in April-June this year, against Rs 844.40 crore in the same period last year.With inputs from agenciesRead all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.