Phuket restaurants urged to track switched-off menu items, not just Grab commission
Delivery Booster founder Aleksei Mazur says Phuket restaurants may be losing about 6% of delivery revenue through menu items left unavailable on Grab, while advertising returns weaken beyond 6% of revenue.
Phuket restaurants may be losing more delivery revenue through menu items left switched off on Grab than through the platform’s commission, according to Delivery Booster founder Aleksei Mazur.
In an article titled “The money Phuket restaurants lose on Grab is not the commission”, published by The Phuket News on 20 September 2026, Mazur said his analysis covered merchant dashboards from more than 200 restaurants in Thailand and Indonesia. The company has managed more than 110 restaurants since 2023, including about a dozen Phuket outlets, while its published data for the year covered 270,000 orders.
Mazur said the Phuket sample was small, but identified a recurring pattern: about 6% of delivery revenue was lost through operational issues, with 93% of that loss attributed to menu items switched off and not restored. The Phuket accounts recorded four cancelled orders among 11,403 orders over 12 months, he said.
He advised restaurant owners to review their switched-off-item report every morning and assign responsibility to a named staff member. The problem can become more costly during Phuket’s high season, when visitor numbers rise sharply.
According to figures cited by Mazur, Phuket receives an average of about 197,000 visitors a day in June and 349,000 in January. Russian visitors number about 162,000 in January, making English and Russian dish names, along with photographs, important considerations for tourist-facing menus, he said.
Mazur also cautioned restaurants against automatically increasing advertising budgets because of strong returns. Grab advertising across the Phuket outlets in his sample generated about 23 times its cost, compared with about 10 times in Bali. However, he said the median return fell from about 12 times below advertising expenditure equivalent to 6% of revenue to less than nine times above that level. The Phuket outlets spent less than 3% of revenue on advertising.
He said the 30% Grab commission was a visible and predictable cost that paid for access to the platform’s customers, riders, payment systems and support. It did not guarantee prominence in the app, which he said was influenced by ratings, order acceptance speed, menu completeness and cancellations.
Mazur also advised restaurants to keep their app opening hours accurate, build ratings before November and consider maintaining a presence on both Grab and LINE MAN rather than accepting exclusivity in return for a lower commission. He said he had not seen that trade-off pay off in the cases covered by his analysis.
