Thursday, May 7, 2015

Groupon Dining Vouchers - A Review

So much has changed in the food industry in the last 5 years. A dining experience at a city 5 star or your favourite restaurant, then, needed a lot of planning and also the moolah but not anymore. Groupon has kind of revolutionised this whole eating out experience and at half the cost literally. Its a one of a kind service where you can avail a wide variety of deals on restaurants. You can know everything about Groupon here. I was approached by a reputed marketing firm managing the Groupon account to dine at one of their partner outlet. They gave me two vouchers to the Lunch/dinner buffet at Hyatt and I roped in the husband to join me for a weekday lunch.

The buffet is on at their 24 hr dining outlet The Waterside café. The ambience is soothing with view of water fountains through the glass façade. Since it was a kind of an official outing for me I wanted to inform the restaurant manager my purpose of visit. Unfortunately, what I got was a very vague response. After explaining myself to three people, the husband and me took a seat by the window. The waiter filled our glasses with water and left hurriedly.

I shall now get to the food and the spread instead of reaccounting my experience (to which I will get back later). The buffet at the Waterside Café has a wide range of everything. From salads to starters to main course to dessert and also a live cooking station. You can eat to your hearts content and be happy about it. And since you just pay just about the half of the original rate when you book through Groupon, double happiness there! The process is easy, you just need to take a printout of the deal voucher, hand it to the staff there and start with your meal.

Now coming back to my dining experience at Hyatt, a lot was left to be desired. At the very onset, they were clueless that someone would go to review on behalf of Groupon ( I was told they were already informed of my visit) and my attempt to make them understand wasn't helping either. The manager definitely needs puts a smile on his face, that would help him in a big way in the service industry. They were also quite uncomfortable with me taking pictures (that explains this almost pictureless post) and I was asked to wait for good 20 mins before they could tell me if it was ok to click or not. I was there for a quick weekday working lunch and wasting 20 mins already did not make sense to me. Honestly by this time I had got restless and was in a hurry to get out of there. Of course there was someone from the marketing team who came to ask if everything was ok but by that time the damage was done.

On a positive note, I did have a chat with their executive chef Clement D souza who told me that they experiment a lot with the buffet menu and try and make is as interesting as possible incorporating dishes from different cuisines. As I could see, the spread did have a good mix of indian and continental dishes to choose from.

They Hyatt offer is available till the end of this month and you can know more about it here

I would highly recommend Groupon to my readers ,because their deals are a steal!

Note: The folks from Edelman were kind enough to send me a couple of pics so adding it for your ref.


 

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