The company says it launched its festive menus early and launched a new ‘Christmas Champions’ scheme to help a number of individual sites to plan ahead and maximise sales.
TCG director of operations Ben Levick said, “We’re delighted with the level of advance bookings for the Christmas season this year, especially out of London. It’s a testament to the hard work of teams across our estate, who have made sure that their pub or bar is seen locally as the best place to celebrate the festive season.
“Key to our success this year has been having a flexible offer that allows our individual sites to cater for a wide range of festive occasions. Although many customers still want a traditional turkey-with-trimmings dinner, we’ve also seen growing demand for more informal drinks and canapé style gatherings. Our pubs and bars have gone out of their way to make their customers’ celebrations special, resulting in this excellent uplift in bookings.”
Christmas Champions
The Christmas Champions scheme, introduced this year, was designed to encourage pubs and bars to focus early on the festive season. In 18 of TCG’s mainstream sites, a member of staff was nominated as the Christmas Champion, and attended a one-day workshop in July. The company said sessions on festive POS, identifying potential customers and setting targets were included and all delegates have helped to achieve significant increases in bookings back in their pubs and bars.
Levick added: “We’ve taken some very large bookings, including one for £23,000 at Via in West India Quay. These are numbers we’ve not seen for a while, and confirm that, finally, the corporate Christmas appears to be back.”