A new survey has been released which identifies our main grievances when it comes to dining out. It seems we are happy to pay top dollar for quality food, but woe betides any establishment who serves up a meal that doesn’t measure up to our expectations.
The survey of 961 Australian diners was carried out by TrueLocal, an online business directory and review website that receives 5.7m unique visitors per month.
When asked what their main customer gripe was when dining out, poor quality food was revealed to be the main one (by 39% of respondents), followed by rude staff (25% of respondents) and long waits or being ignored (22%). In a State-by-State comparison, Victorians identified rude staff as their biggest bugbear more than any other state (29% of Victorian respondents), while Queensland topped the list of complainants when it came poor quality food (45% of Queensland respondents), while NSW diners the most frustrated when it came to staff attentiveness and the time taken to receive their orders (28% of NSW respondents).
The good news for restaurants is that, nationally, customers are far less likely to complain about the price of our meal than they are about rude staff or poor food, with only 6.4% of respondents citing the expense of dining out as their main point of contention with the overall experience. Australians are even more inclined to overlook the ambience, with only 4.6% of respondents describing poor ambience as the thing most likely to ruin their evening.
“Dining out is an occasion that should always be a pleasurable experience so you want to make sure you secure a venue that exceeds standards, particularly if you’re celebrating a special event. Taking a few minutes to check reviews will give you the information you need to make a good, well informed decision so that your dinner or lunch event is the best that it possibly could be,” says Bradley Taylor, spokesperson at TrueLocal.
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