TripAdvisor Hooks Up With Takeaway to Add Food Delivery in Europe

I love talking about online food delivery concepts because it’s tailor-made for mobile payments. Place your order and pay for it from the same interface, then just sit back and wait for dinner. It’s a wonderfully futuristic concept, or at least it will be once the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finally gets out of the way of drone delivery. Recently, though, we got a little closer—at least in Europe—with a new alliance between travel site TripAdvisor and Dutch food delivery system Takeaway.com.

The combination of the two will open up the better than 31,000 restaurants that are connected to Takeaway and make these a part of the TripAdvisor system. That means an addition to the desktop site, the mobile site, and the mobile app.

While traveling in Europe, TripAdvisor users will be able to quickly find a meal delivered to most anywhere they want it just by clicking a button marked “Order Online.” That includes restaurants not only in the Netherlands, but also in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, and Switzerland.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an expansion effort like this. Not so long ago, Grubhub stepped up its own operations with the addition of BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse to the roster, a move which shows that, even while on vacation, people want food delivery.

Why shouldn’t they? After all, you’ve got a hotel room, maybe it’s even a nice one. One of those really nice ones with full-package cable and a hot tub right in the room. The notion of getting up and going to do something so mundane as to fetch your own dinner just goes against the grain and shatters the immersion. With a tool like this, meanwhile, the hungry and vacation-lazy can just order it up for delivery. Okay, granted, they’re still going to have to make the trek across the room to fetch the food brought to the door, but some of these things are just unavoidable.

It’s the kind of thing that can really make your vacation less stressful, and what’s the point of a vacation if not to experience at least a little time that doesn’t have stress in it? Takeaway and TripAdvisor may have given themselves a real market edge offering just such an alternative.