Dinner at Busaba, where a 50% TheFork offer was only the first layer of the stack.
TheFork is a restaurant reservation platform operating across the UK, Europe and Australia. Similar to other restaurant booking apps, like OpenTable, the premise is to give you somewhere to book restaurants, but also to help with choosing them. Participating restaurants can offer discounts at particular times, sometimes as much as 50% off food, while bookings also earn TheFork’s rewards currency, called “Yums.”
A regular booking earns 100 Yums. Build up enough of them and you’ll be able to apply them against future dining bookings. Ten ordinary bookings get you 1000 Yums, which equates to £20 off a future dining bill.
Concept: Great. Excitement value: Meh.
There’s slightly more to it, but those are the building blocks. I’ve used TheFork for some time, but I don’t recall ever booking through it just to collect another 100 Yums. I tend to wait until the pieces stack.
A recent dinner at Busaba Bangkok Thai at Westfield in London was a good example. Busaba is already somewhere we like: an upmarket Thai chain with a few signature dishes we regularly order, and a known quantity in a good way.
Busaba at Westfield London, the setting for this TheFork case study.
The offer
Busaba was offering 50% off food for reservations made through TheFork. At the same time, I had a targeted promotion offering 800 bonus Yums if I made a qualifying reservation using the promotional code MISSU2.
So before we arrived, two parts of the stack were already in place: 50% off the food + 800 bonus Yums.
The stack at booking: 50% off plus 800 bonus Yums.
TheFork allows Yums to be earned on reservations that also receive restaurant discounts, so the two benefits weren’t competing with one another. Combined, they were enough to get my attention.
What 50% off actually meant
We ordered normally, though in retrospect we over-ordered and ended up taking some of the meal home. Our food came to £66.30, with another £29.10 of drinks. That produced a pre-discount food-and-drink bill of £95.40.
The discount worked as expected:
50% × £66.30 = £33.15.
That brought the food and drinks down to £62.25.
This is often the case with TheFork offers. A restaurant advertising 50% off food isn’t usually offering 50% off the entire check. Drinks are regularly excluded, and individual restaurants can impose their own conditions. At Busaba, though, every food item received the full 50% discount.
The service charge didn’t get discounted
The final bill: £33.15 off the food, with service calculated on the pre-discount amount.
Busaba then added a 12.5% service charge. That was calculated on the original £95.40 food-and-drink bill, not the discounted £62.25, so came to £11.93.
The final calculation was therefore:
£95.40 food and drinks
− £33.15 TheFork discount
+ £11.93 service charge
= £74.18 paid
Without TheFork, the same bill would have been £107.33. So “50% off food” didn’t mean dinner cost half as much. It reduced the final bill by £33.15, or just under 31%.
None of this was unexpected. For an American accustomed to tipping on the pre-discount value of a restaurant meal, the service calculation probably won’t look unusual and, in an era of 20%+ standard tips Stateside, may not look especially generous. In Britain, automatically added service charges aren’t universally assumed, so calculating one on the pre-discount amount can make the final saving look rather different from the headline offer.
Either way, in our case we still spent £33.15 less than we would have.
Why the 800 Yums matter
TheFork normally awards 100 Yums for a reservation, with some restaurants offering double Yums. Promotional offers can be much more generous. The redemption scale is also important:
1000 Yums = £20 off; 2000 Yums = £50 off
That means it is worth holding out for a 2000-Yum redemption rather than using them as soon as you get to 1000. Given that a restaurant bill on which I’d want to use them is likely to exceed £50 anyway, I wait until I have 2000 and take the £50 discount.
At that redemption level, the 800 bonus Yums from this dinner represent £20 of eventual restaurant value.
That’s not £20 of cash, and there is an important limitation: a Yums redemption cannot normally be combined with another TheFork promotional offer. I still have to reach 2000 Yums, find an eligible restaurant where using them makes sense, and redeem them before they expire. But 800 Yums move the account a long way toward a useful redemption. If I had a zero balance, I would only need one or two more promotions of similar size to be in a position to extract the full value. In reality, I already have a balance and am almost there.
That’s why I pay more attention to elevated Yums offers than to the standard earning rate. Sometimes I’ll look for a restaurant offering double Yums and combine that with a good restaurant discount. Other times, an offer like this one does the job.
And then there’s the card
TheFork didn’t process the payment. We paid Busaba directly, which meant the remaining restaurant bill could still earn normal credit-card rewards.
I used my US American Express Gold Card, earning 4 Membership Rewards points per dollar. At my working valuation of 1.5 cents per point, I value that at a 6% return on the card spend. Depending on the day and time, Citi Nights can make a US Citi Strata Elite even more rewarding at restaurants, although its 6x window is based on Eastern time.
All-in Value Received
Without TheFork, this dinner would have cost £107.33. We actually paid £74.18.
The booking also earned 800 Yums, which I value at £20 toward an eventual 2000-Yum redemption, while paying with my US Amex Gold generated another £4.45 of Membership Rewards value at my usual 1.5 cents per point.
On that basis:
£74.18 paid
− £20.00 future Yums value
− £4.45 Membership Rewards value
= £49.73 effective cost
Against the original £107.33 bill, that’s an effective cost of 46.3% of face value, including the modeled value of rewards earned for future use.
There is an accounting argument for attributing the Yums value when I eventually burn them rather than when I earn them. I’m comfortable mentally recognizing it here because this is the transaction that created the value, I’m already close to the 2000-Yum threshold, and I expect to redeem it easily.
Why I keep TheFork on my phone
A modest restaurant discount might not change where I eat. Another 100 Yums certainly won’t. But a restaurant I’m happy to visit at 50% off food, combined with an elevated Yums offer and a strong return on the remaining card spend, can get eating out into a price range I’m much more comfortable paying.
For travelers heading to Europe, that’s enough reason to know TheFork exists.
New to TheFork? If you have questions about getting started or the current referral offer, you can reach me at [email protected].