Hong Kong happy hours app to help users find drink deals near them has over 400 bars signed up as its official launch nears
- The Happy Hour Hong Kong app lets users find deals on drinks near their location. Its developer sees it as the bar equivalent of restaurant directory OpenRice
- Ahead of its official launch this month it has more than 400 bars across Hong Kong listed
One day, when Briton Mark Sinclair was on the ferry from Mui Wo on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island travelling back to Central, he noticed a man googling on his smartphone where to find bars with happy hours.
“He then had to look through their website, copy and paste the address, open maps and search for the bar. This was a light bulb moment when I thought, ‘Let’s make that search easier with a much smoother process’,” Sinclair recalls.
That led to him developing the Happy Hour Hong Kong app, the bar version of OpenRice – the Hong Kong online restaurant directory.
Sinclair’s bar app was created late last year and went live at the end of February, but because the coronavirus pandemic kept most bars closed at that time, Sinclair will officially celebrate the launch of the app only on November 27.
“More people are out and about now, so we just thought this is the time,” he says with social-distancing measures in mind.
The app lists more than 400 bars in almost all of Hong Kong’s 18 districts, and since February has been downloaded more than 1,700 times. Sinclair is aiming for 10,000 users by the end of 2021.
