TheFork Festival is returning from 21 April to 29 May with a mission to get Australian diners back into restaurants in a big way.

Restaurants are invited to take part in Australia’s biggest dining campaign, which will entice millions of diners to get off the couch and eat out at participating venues with a 50% discount on their food bill.

TheFork Festival aims to help restaurants boost bookings, grow revenue and fill costly empty tables, with participating restaurants experiencing 4.5 times more bookings* during the Festival period on average.

The campaign also gives restaurants an important opportunity to attract new customers – a massive 97% of Festival bookings are from people dining at that restaurant for the first time.         

With a number of popular Australian venues already set to take part, TheFork Festival will help the industry switch back into gear after another tough few months.

“The pandemic has caused many of us to settle into new habits of staying at home and ordering in instead of going out. In this respect, you could say that restaurants are suffering from a unique form of long COVID.

“Empty tables are the biggest expense to any restaurant and TheFork Festival aims to tackle this problem head on. It’s a call to arms which incentivises diners to ditch the couch, Go Fooding and support restaurants,” said James Walmsley, Head of Marketing at TheFork Australia.

 Why participate? The data speaks for itself:

  • Attract new customers – 97% of Festival bookings are made by new customers
  • Boost bookings -on average, participating restaurants experience 4.5x more bookings than the weeks prior to the Festival
  • Gain greater online visibility – exposure to TheFork’s 595k** unique monthly audience and 1 million+ diner database
  • Stand out from the crowd – participating restaurants get 7.5x more page views during the Festival and 11x more bookings than restaurants that don’t participate
  • Backed by TheFork marketing – benefit from an extensive Festival advertising, email, social media and PR campaign, aimed to get eyeballs on your venue

Want to be part of the action?

TheFork Festival is open to all Australian restaurants, even if they’re not currently a customer of TheFork or are using an alternate reservation platform. Learn more and sign up now.

*TheFork internal data. **Nielsen, 18+, Jan-Dec 2021