It was a lunch time discussion between me and the wife. We were wandering multiple topics, as usual, and suddenly came to a point where we thought, there should be a coupon code to goto a specific place. And then I remembered my Dad was cribbing the other day about attending a wedding at some place so far away from the city, it almost felt like a picnic across the city. So we thought of this simple idea.
Modern marraiges in all the major cities are largely an outsourced/managed affair. At the simplest levels, the catering guys already handle about 40% of the things to be done and the marraige halls handle another 40-50%. The families involved just have to show up, perform the rituals, pose for a few shots, collect some gifts, eat and move on. More or less. The biggest problem in arranging a wedding in today’s times, apart from pairing a bride with a groom and assuming they didn’t find themselves, is finding a marraige hall. Sometimes, you are so pressed with time that you are ready to pick marraige halls half way across the city. And for cities like Chennai, that’s a pretty big half. Just going from Anna nagar to Mylapore could take anything like 1.5 hours. Now if you considered marraige halls in OMR and/or off-ECR, we are talking a 2-3 hour ride, one way. And that’s all within the city (or what is accepted as city, forget what the authorities have to say).
In most of these remote location halls, reaching the location is the worst part. And if you had to host the wedding on a weekday morning, add 30-40 minutes traffic and most people would bail out just citing this. Can we, then, make it easier for the guests to arrive at the marraige halls using one or more of the ride-hailing services? Finding a cab is usually quite easy, unless it is raining. But who would pay 500-600 bucks to attend a wedding? So, what if the wedding halls provide coupon codes? They could use it as a marketing tool to make their hall interesting. Or maybe they could share the bills with the hosts.
For cab hailing companies, they got nothing to lose. They are anyway going bankrupt giving away coupon codes to attract potential riders. Now they get to give coupon codes for which someone is paying, outside of their marketing budget and maybe they get a chance to make it sticky. For the wedding halls, its a way to make it more attractive to the wedding planners. For the families involved, it maybe a way to make the wedding more accessible to their near and dear. That sounds like a win to me. If its not, then you know why I am not in the business!