Expert Insight ‘Next Visit Please’ Your Hospitality sales and strategic business development experts.
Ah readers there have been many times over the last 12 months when hoping for a first visit (let alone the next) to a Bar, Restaurant, Pub or Café has been fraught with anticipation, mixed with hope, and then peril!
For those of you familiar with my Company – or who have been bombarded with our social media posts (you’re welcome) – you will note how we are ever the optimists at Bums on Seats and love challenging the status quo. If there is an opportunity, we will drag it to the surface kicking and screaming for all to see and take full advantage of, which many are now planning. However, under lockdown these opportunities were (admittedly) far and few between. So, witness my delight and euphoria at receiving a ‘re-opening’ roadmap, even one that seemed so distant I am sure we all doubted its authenticity. But yes! It appears to be happening at last, and with that belief our beautiful paying public are already booking their favourite venues as far ahead as December! Many of our clients, and our ‘Bums Best Of’ supply networks including Collins / Design My Night, AND Our Bums Partners’ Zonal, are all reporting an increase in pre-booked covers of up 1085% in the last 4 weeks.
We now know that the Hospitality bounce back is real!
This leads me nicely onto the Bums on Seats latest industry wide campaign (I am hoping some of you saw our ‘Take Out to Help Out’ plea in January), not due to be launched until mid-May (so shhhh!). Nonetheless I felt that this lovely
10 April 2021
www.venue-insight.com
readership deserved a little sneak preview and might also benefit from some practical tips to drive organic growth into your venues through pre-booked sales. I want to see less survival this year and more thrive(al) – forgive me I couldn’t help it!
Firstly, let me take you back to 2020 to set the scene (No! I hear you scream – please not that!). Bear with me because it’s imperative that we revisit the lessons to be learned (by way of a lovely chart as my fingers are already hurting from my furious typing), and which are still relevant for 2021.
Amber Staynings, CEO and Founder of Bums on Seats.
These are the four pillars of resilience that Bums on Seats have identified as being most crucial to our sector:
When venues were allowed to open last year (remember that?) the focus for 2020 was customer safety, first and foremost. Did you know that our sector had to manage over 50 separate changes last year? Now I love change, but that’s one step too far for anyone! We know Operators needed to embrace change and grow business resilience to survive, but the pace of change meant that Management Teams had to prioritise safety sometimes at the expense of good old-fashioned customer service. The focus for 2021 now can – and must - change back again to putting ‘bums on seats’ and beating the competition by creating a unique reason to visit which is memorable, and which will – in-turn – inspire multiple return visits.
You will need to be a destination: Hence, my next Campaign ‘Next Visit Please’.
Good old-fashioned Hospitality, pre-booked sales and guest experience is back! And of course, if you ask me, they should never have gone away.
Our creative insight agency partners KAM Media allow Bums on Seats to use data and ‘intelligent’ customer insight to enable us to base our recommendations on fact and not feeling, which is a little mantra of ours now. In a recent survey of UK adults 34% said they will return in April for outside dining/drinking
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
