Offline — Restaurant Club 17+

Worth being a member

I’ve been an Offline member for over a year now. The reason I’ve kept the membership, and even transitioned from monthly to an annual membership, is because I’ve enjoyed wonderful experiences in food and friendship. From exploring restaurants I wouldn’t normally go to to doing that with good friends as well as meeting new people. Even when I go to an event alone, I may have good conversation with other members and always have good food.

The app itself has worked fine for me and when I have issues, I get a quick response from the team.

I also truly appreciate how Offline supports local restaurants and other local concepts with the business. Best of all, what makes this membership great is it pays for itself!

One of the best choices I made last year!

I joined offline as soon as they started operating in my city. The local area has grown dramatically with so many new places and restaurants, I didn’t know where to start. Not only does Offline give you great restaurants to choose from every month, the events are awesome! The uniqueness of having private member only events where you get to experience great foods from new restaurants and the overall value of the membership is incomparable to anything I have used thus far. I’m an very happy with this app and restaurant club. I’m glad I took the step to try something new and get to try something different and new every month now. 🤩

The fine print

The restaurant can add a 20% tip if the feel like it…you never know who will or won’t. Seems like merchants get tired of the discounts before the end of the month and just start giving crappy( no) service and then stick you with 20% tip…

So: don’t tell them OFFLINE sent you until the very end. And then don’t be surprised when your bill goes up by 20%. In fact they will not mention it, and still hope to get an additional tip…”sign here and fill in the tip”…look close!

Overall the restaurants have been good food, but you will probably leave with a bad taste in your mouth…OFFLINE is a middle man…one more person trying to take some of their profit. The restaurants are already struggling for business, or they wouldn’t need OFFLINE. Now all these low margin customers come and make them get busy, requiring more staff and hours, but not more profitable. The concept was a great idea on the surface…but in practice, you find out you are just accelerating the demise of a struggling restaurant…like the days we all used to use Groupon…only with trendy hipster vibes.

In conclusion, use the app to see who is struggling…go visit them if you want to…but don’t use the coupon and tip what the service and food deserves. It will not fix a struggling business by introducing a middle man to feast on their narrow profit margins.

Developer Response ,

Hi there. Any restaurant that adds auto-gratuity to your bill is identified in the restaurant's Offer page. You can scroll through the Offer notes and will see a line about this. I appreciate your attempt at understanding our business model with the restaurants, but it's simply wrong. We've worked very hard at making sure restaurants don't pay Offline anything to acquire new fans of their spot. ~Taylor: VP Product & Engineering