Social Dining Apps
Description
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD:
"the app AirDine ... lets users pay to eat at strangers’ houses, rating the experience afterward. The app started in Sweden last year, and expanded to the United States and elsewhere in March.
Whether AirDine and a wave of similar apps can get consumers to embrace them is a question. While other companies have conquered car rides (Uber), bedroom rentals (Airbnb) and errand running (TaskRabbit), AirDine and services like EatWith and Feastly are trying to master shared dining. Yet social dining has not so far caught on in the same way, and a few of the apps have already shut down.
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EatWith, whose site started in 2012. “When people try it, they love it, but how do we get people to try this new way of experiencing a city or a new way of eating out? It’s been an intellectual conundrum.”
The social-dining companies all come at the premise from different angles. EatWith focuses on travelers, with meals in 200 cities. Feastly signs up professional chefs as hosts. VoulezVouzDîner lets travelers and other diners request hosted meals on specific days. AirDine asks hosts to arrange fixed dinners and, ideally, fill the table with strangers. And BonAppetour and VizEat offer food experiences, like market tours, along with meals.
But all try to make money in the same way: The companies take a percentage of what hosts charge guests to attend, usually 15 to 20 percent. Hosts can set whatever price they like for guests; Ms. Larsson charged $10 a head, while lots of EatWith and Feastly meals run $80 and up. The companies generally do not charge guests or hosts to join the platforms.
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Many of the social-dining sites and apps began around 2012, spurred by other companies that promote the sharing model, like Airbnb.
“After that exists for a few years, you look at your kitchen and say, couldn’t that be a restaurant?” said Simon Rothman, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, whose firm led an $8 million financing of EatWith in 2014. “At that moment, it starts to be obvious to multiple people.”
He said he understood why hosts might embrace the idea, while potential guests remain wary. “The host has a sense of control,” Mr. Rothman said, including turning down potential guests. “The idea of, I’m going to go to someone’s house I don’t know, it feels slightly different.”
Many hurdles to the business are also cultural. Sagiv Ofek, who brought HomeDine, his social-dining website and app, to the United States from Tel Aviv in 2013, said that it was typical in Israel for people to open the door and invite others over. But “what I discovered in the U.S. is, people are more territorial and more personal about their own personal space,” he said.
After finding limited success with HomeDine in San Francisco, Mr. Ofek tried New York. There, he said, hosts and guests were social but real estate was a problem. “If they had a kitchen, it is a tiny kitchen where they cannot cook anything,” he said. He shut down HomeDine in 2014.
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Mitch Monsen, the founder of Kitchen.ly, a social-dining app that he shuttered in 2013, said diners were particularly concerned about sanitary issues and hosts’ personal-cleanliness standards." (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/technology/airdine-social-dining-apps.html?)