Many new players have appeared in the online food distribution sector and a high number of them are travel firms. The firms temporarily closed their offices after the Prime Minister’s policy on social distancing and began selling food online.

Saigontourist began providing new services at restaurants and hotels with 3 stars or more – delivering food to doors in HCM City, Quang Tri, Buon Ma Thuot and Phu Tho.

In HCM City, the door-to-door food delivery program is applied at the following hotels: Grand and Rex, Dong Khanh, Sai Gon, Liberty Central Saigon Citypoint, and Dam Sen Restaurant.

In Quang Tri, the Sai Gon – Dong Ha Hotel is running the ‘fast ship’ program with the menu comprising high-quality dishes at reasonable prices.

Many new players have appeared in the online food distribution sector and a high number of them are travel firms. The firms temporarily closed their offices after the Prime Minister’s policy on social distancing and began selling food online.

Saigon tourist, in addition to selling tours, also has a network of 100 restaurants and hotels across the country. It needs shift from offline sale into online.

Saigontourist’s restaurants and hotels are mostly 4-5 star and provide many Asian dishes. As they are mostly located in the central areas of cities, it is favorable to provide door-to-door deliveries.

Sun Group also has a large network of hotels and resorts throughout the country. However, as its facilities are located far from central areas and they provide international style food, it is more difficult to sell online.

iVIVU belongs to Thien Minh Group, which owns a 3-star restaurant chain called Spice Vietnam in many large cities. This gives iVIVU great advantages in selling lunch online.

If other hotel room booking apps such as Traveloka Booking and Agoda want to jump on the bandwagon, they will have to spend time to set up everything from the very beginning.

iVIVU mintroduced a door-to-door lunch service some days ago. On its website, iVIVU said it serves the three culinary styles of the northern, southern and central regions and dishes prepared in styles of three master chefs – Chu Anh Tiep (Spice Viet Hanoi), Huynh Van Phap (Spice Viet Hue) and Nguyen Tan Trung (Spice Viet Sai Gon).

Meanwhile, Hue Smile and BI Travel, with small scale and good understanding about local culture and food, can easily shift to sell Hue and Phan Rang specialties.

Analysts believe that stopping their core business fields and shifting to local specialities would be an impossible mission for larger travel firms, such as Vietravel and Lua Viet.

Thanh Lich 

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