An intoxicating drive

Come weekend and the City streets are filled with cops checking on drunken drivers. Heavy fines and embarrassing alcohol tests can surely spoil one’s weekend. To avoid all this and more, many pubs and lounges in the City have introduced offers and innovative ways where they do their part to promote responsible drinking.

“Though I don’t approve of people over-drinking, I can’t really stop them. So it is better to provide them with offers where they can drink and be driven to avoid unpleasant consequences. The entire aim of this exercise is to not to drive drunk,” says Dipali from Kyra. The place not only offers its customers a pick up and drop back their homes free of cost, they also have valet drivers who drop the intoxicated customers back to their homes in their own cars. “Sometimes if all the drivers are booked in advance, we ourselves have taken some of them back home,” she adds.

Athena, another lounge in the City too provides a free ride back home for all those who are highly intoxicated. “We make sure that the person is considerably sober otherwise we have cabs with drivers who drop back the guests without any extra charge,” says Manoj from Athena.

Dipali has also noticed that when people come in a group they tend to over order the drink which ultimately leads to them trying to force it down. “When one orders more than he or she can drink, it also leads to them getting drunk, so we introduced something called ‘tag it or bag it’,” she explains. This allows a customer to tag his or her drink and the pub would bottle it for them and keep it so that they can finish it when they come the next time.

Another lounge that has an ongoing campaign on responsible drinking is Zara, Tapas Bar. The uniform worn by the waiters of this place carries the line ‘drink responsibly’. “We also have another campaign called the ‘designated driver campaign’, this applies to customers who come in a group and if one person in the group refrains from drinking alcohol, we give them a badge of ‘designated driver’ for the group and before they leave, we give him or her a free drink or food coupon,” explains Mathew from Zara.

Surely, this is one trend a lot of party people would take a liking towards.