Gourmet Pass (グルメパス)

» see gourmetpass.auone.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular put out a joint release on 21 August 2017 announcing Gourmet Pass, a 390 yen a month subscription for au smartphone customers that would, in the release's own phrase, totally support your eating both at home and out. The first thirty days were free. You paid through au's carrier billing and you needed one of au's data courses on top, so the thing only existed if you were already a customer.

KDDI had assembled this out of other people's products. The restaurant half was 食べログ's paid membership, supplied by Kakaku.com: discount coupons and the area-by-area rankings that normally sit behind that site's own paywall. The cooking half was クックパッド's paid membership, which meant the hall-of-fame recipes and the daily access rankings. Cookpad put out its own release the same day confirming its side of it.

It ended on 31 December 2018, sixteen months and ten days after it opened. Both first-party notices use 終了, a full stop rather than a pause on new signups, and the au.com version adds that as of 1 January 2019 every remaining subscriber had been canceled automatically. No reason was given in either one.

This was carrier-locked to a degree that makes the usual question of whether it reached Turkey beside the point. You could not have one without an au line, and the coupons were no use outside Japan.

~ the dossier ~

~ what 390 yen actually bought ~

The dining coupons came in two shapes. A lunch coupon took a meal that normally cost 650 yen or more down to a flat 500, and a premium coupon took at least 20 percent off a bill. The fine print gave you two coupons a month, and an unused one could be carried forward for three. Each restaurant capped how many it would honor, which is the sentence that quietly does most of the work in any coupon product.

The marketing and the press release did not agree with each other about the size of the discount. KDDI's release promised 20 percent or more. The landing page's own headline advertised up to 70 percent off. Both of those were live at the same time, on the same product.

The third component was the only thing KDDI contributed from its own side: a 500 yen voucher every month for au WALLET Market, its own shop. That voucher was nominally worth more than the 390 yen subscription that produced it, which sounds like a mistake until you read the condition attached. It only applied to a purchase of 2,500 yen or more, so what it actually discounted was a larger spend you had to commit to first.

~ four stories at the launch and none at the end ~

Four Japanese outlets covered the launch, which is what a joint release from a national carrier and two well-known internet brands buys you. The shutdown got no press release and no coverage anywhere. The entire record that this product ended consists of two first-party tombstones plus one line in the carrier's register of discontinued services.

No number was ever published about it. Nobody gave a subscriber count or a restaurant count, at launch or afterward. It also died alone: across the whole of KDDI's own end-of-service register, Gourmet Pass is the single entry with a December 2018 date, its nearest neighbors sitting five and six months earlier. There is no cluster to blame and no platform reorganization that swept it up.

~ where the dining perk went ~

The closing notices did do one useful thing: they told you where to go. For restaurant coupons, buy 食べログ directly. For recipes, you may already have them, because クックパッド for auスマートパス was bundled into au's larger subscription anyway. Both halves of the product outlived the product, still for sale from the companies that had always owned them. That larger subscription is now called Pontaパス and costs 548 yen a month. It carries a dining perk again, sourced this time from HOT PEPPER グルメ.

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