Cellarmaster BYO Finder app helps find BYOs

The Cellarmaster BYO Finder app is a great way to locate restaurants and cafes that may be licenced or BYO and don’t mind you bringing your own tipple.

Best of all the more you use BYO Finder the completer, and more accurate the crowd-sourced listings become.

BYO Finder is the brainchild of Cellarmasters (website here), a member of the Woolworth’s Endeavour Drinks group along with Dan Murphy’s, BWS and Langtons. The app may have been born out of the desire to sell more Cellarmasters products, but it has taken on its own life as a valuable reference tool.

According to a Cellarmasters survey, over 74% of wine lovers prefer to dine at a BYO restaurant rather than just a licensed venue.

Ben Copeman-Hill, General Manager of Cellarmasters, said

“Our customers love to know they can enjoy a great bottle when they dine, which is why they prefer BYO restaurants so they can bring their own. We wanted to make it easy for them to have a great wining and dining experience every time, which is why we decided to create the BYO Finder app. The app is great for discovering new restaurants in your area, and it’s the perfect app to have on hand when you’re travelling.”

The Cellarmasters BYO Finder app

Its currently for Android only (iOS to come soon) and it is strictly version 1.0 so expect a few foibles.

The Android app features

FIND LOCAL BYO RESTAURANTS
– An interactive map helps you easily search for local BYO restaurants
– Explore listings, view photos, check opening hours and more
– Hail an Uber directly from the app
CUSTOMISE YOUR SEARCHES
– Filter results by cuisine
FIND THE PERFECT PAIR
– Match your favourite foods to the perfect wine (and vice versa)
EXPLORE WINE RELATED CONTENT
– Learn more about wines, varieties, regions and more

GadgetGuy attended the BYO Finder launch and asked the hard questions (that lifestyle writers don’t even contemplate).

GG: What is your business model – how are you going to monetise the app?

Cellarmasters: It is a labour of love. Sure, it will help us to promote products and deals to users. You have to sign in, and it requires name, email, phone, date of birth and a password. Any marketing is opt-in.

GG: Can you promise not to sell users data?

Cellarmasters is part of the Woolworths Endeavour Drinks group and is subject to the same privacy provisions as any other Woolworths company. We will be collecting far less information than it already holds in its Rewards or Credit card program, and it is not our intent to use the data outside Cellarmasters.

GG: Why did you write the BYO Finder app?

We are all wine lovers and often comment that we have better bottles at home than you get at a restaurant. We want to encourage BYO and encourage smaller restaurants and café’s to be happy to accept it on their terms. For example, a café can state their corkage rates or perferred days for BYO etc upfront.

GG: Are you charging cafes or restaurants to be listed?

No. In fact, after the initial 3200 listings that we gathered, we hope it will become a wine lovers’ user-updated community. We can’t say where the app will go – perhaps a booking system in the future. It is what it is – a way to find BYOs near you.

GadgetGuy’s take – BYO Finder has already helped me plan the weekend

BYO Finder is a genuine BYO Finder app – not a thinly disguised app to get your details (well it does anyway).

I have already discovered a host of small neighbourhood restaurants (that I did not know existed) and will dig out the Grange or St Henri and head along enjoying wine I love.