My personal interactions with the hospitality industry during the latter part of the year had been slightly dispiriting and seriously less than hospitable in the odd case. Early December had seen a celebratory lunch at The Ritz with my mother end rather prematurely following a rather unsavoury confrontation with an exceedingly obnoxious customer. The learning from this was that you can choose your restaurant, but you can’t choose your fellow diners. 

 

This was followed by a Christmas Eve dinner at The Holborn Dining Room in the Rosewood London Hotel that involved very friendly service, but this was unable to overcome the factors such as overly loud music overpowering the festive chatter and rather pedestrian food for the money. This can lead you to question the value you are receiving for what is the increasingly frequent occurrence of bills running away from you. Needless to say, the bill always finds its way back to you when it’s time to pay.

 

Thankfully, my spirits were lifted, and my love of dining out returned to me during a short stay between Christmas and New Year (or “Twixmas”) at The Bell Hotel in the Kent town of Sandwich. This has always been a favourite period of my family’s, with a relaxed vibe fuelled by families of multiple generations coming together to celebrate the holiday period.

 

Such trips have become an annual activity – we should really call it a Christmas tradition – and often involve grandparents, with everyone enjoying this time together while being absolved from those boring old chores that are involved with having guests to stay and the non-stop cooking of various meals. We have typically decamped to the much-loved Old Bridge Hotel in Huntingdon, but this year we decided to shake things up a bit with a change of scenery in Kent.

 

The results were pretty much the same. A couple of days in a relaxing environment that is devoid of the invariable pressures that seem to impact on both Christmas and the New Year celebrations. Just like the Old Bridge, The Bell Hotel was stuffed with large multi-generational groups having an enjoyable time together with the upside of a great value food and drink offer. Lots of choices for diners of all generations, and at prices that wouldn’t shock the unfortunate member of the family footing the bill.

 

The one differential between the two venues was the lack of any Twixmas deal at The Bell Hotel, which we have always valued at the Old Bridge and at other hotels and pubs that undertake similar practices. The deals typically work on the dynamic of half-price accommodation as long as you have two courses in the restaurant for each night of your stay. This has always struck me as a great way to attract business at quieter times of the year and ensure there is a buzzy bar and restaurant. Having a lively food and beverage offer has always been a major driver for me to stay in places where accommodation is available. There’s clearly something of a virtuous circle thing going on here with these promotions.

 

In reality, such mechanics can be used at any time of the year. My family’s multi-generational short stays at the glorious The Grand Hotel at Eastbourne have always involved such deals being taken at the peak-time of the school summer holidays. In my case, the hotel ultimately reaps rewards from this promotional offer because I’m a sucker for going large on the wines when faced with linen tablecloths, and The Grand excels in this area.

 

Okay, that’s enough looking backwards. Having had my hospitality spirit reignited by Twixmas, I’m now looking forward to 2024 and the opportunity to visit some of the restaurants and bars that I failed to make it to last year – and I’ll no doubt experience some new places that swing open their doors for the first time this year. I’ve already got my eye on some local restaurants as well as locations to visit in the UK. If they have an accommodation/food and beverage promo, then they definitely count me in, and can they please send me the wine list?

 

Encountering grand or spectacular architecture, a former colleague used to puncture the pomposity by shrugging his shoulders and declaring dismissively that, “it’s somewhere to sit”. I wonder, though, whether making somewhere to sit is that easy. Walking into a pub and having difficulty choosing a seat is probably so common for me that I’ve failed to reflect on it. Extreme examples do stick in the memory, such as the time I arrived at a large, sprawling Lake District inn after a hard day on the fells.

The place was pretty much deserted. I ordered my pint and gazed out over an astonishing array of mis-matched tables and chairs. There must have been 100 covers, but I stood there paralysed by indecision for a minute before plonking myself down. Within moments I was up again, trying a different seat. Then another, and another. I just couldn’t get comfortable or feel relaxed. I’d been walking all day, yet in a sea of empty seats, could find nowhere to sit.

What’s going on here? Pub design is a controversial and enigmatic subject, closely related to those abstractions that are invoked whenever someone tries to describe a good boozer: atmosphere and character. It’s a touchy-feely kind of a thing, although surely there must be some rules?

The Campaign for Real Ale does a good job in focusing attention on the issue with its annual Pub Design Awards, but looking at the 2023 winners, it’s hard to determine what they have in common. Incidentally, I’ve visited one of the highly commended pubs a few times, and I’m afraid to say it’s among those where I never know where to sit.

There’s a school of opinion that suggests what we feel is a “a good pub” is fundamentally not designed at all – or rather its original design has, over decades and perhaps centuries, been layered with accretions of details and minor alterations and additions that give it the character we crave.

Christopher Hutt, in his influential 1973 book The Death of the English Pub, writes: “The character of a pub can reside partially in features that are archaic, useless or simply in the way.” He bemoans the way these features were being “ripped out” by brewers seeking a more rational functionality.

Even he finds a place for some new builds, though, where the customer area is sensitively broken up into “defined areas of varying shapes and sizes” that “gently underline” the “natural process” of people gathering in groups. The trend towards big open-plan spaces is really what he’s against.

A one-room pub, I find, can be helped by an island bar. Or at least a peninsula bar (attached to one wall). Originally, they would have allowed a small team of staff to serve customers occupying discrete areas, and even where the partitions have been broken down, it makes sense for a couple of reasons.

It brings together the whole pub. You might be in your own group, but you can see, and hear, the people across the other side, and you feel part of a bigger society. I’ve also noticed that when there aren’t many customers, an island bar makes the most of them. The pub rarely feels dead. The mistake is to make more space for tables by pushing the bar up against one wall. It seems a rational thing to do, but it’s a false economy, I reckon. 

A new operator took over one of my locals some years back and shifted the bar to the middle of the pub. Now you walk in the door and the beer pumps are two paces in front of your face, along with a smiling bartender, if you’re lucky. You immediately feel welcome and part of a crowd, even when it’s just you.

Surviving multi-roomed pubs survive to give a clue about what might be valuable in this aesthetic. I recently visited the 18th century Star Inn in Bath, split into four panelled areas around a small central bar. I knew exactly where to sit and soon struck up a conversation with a couple of regulars sharing the same room. 

The new breed of micropub often generates a similar chemistry. It’s on a human scale, in contrast to the pubs designed in the 1960s by Watney Mann’s Roy Wilson-Smith. Hutt quotes him as saying: “I want to give people who use my houses a rare and primitive relationship with the raw forces of nature. People love to be awed when they enter a pub by a superior natural force – a strange sort of higher masochism.”

Call me a higher masochist if you like, but I’m quite drawn to this vision. I do think there’s a place for pubs as a sublime spectacle – cavernous spaces that expose the original architecture of a church or bank or theatre. And they are theatrical spaces, stages for ordinary people to perform. Though not, perhaps, every day of the week. When you just want somewhere to sit.

A friend’s daughter recently had two extremely distressing experiences with her landlord. The first was a (five-year-old new build) home which, according to the law of this land, was unfit for human habitation. A threat to withhold rent in a desperate attempt to drive action was met with a threat to change the locks. My friend’s daughter and her flatmate were powerless whichever way they turned. 

 

Understandably traumatised by the first experience, they moved into a lovely place with a lovely landlord and a slightly more engaged agency. This landlord was so friendly he even sent the two a gift voucher to apologise for the boiler not working for a few days. But soon after, the boiler went on the blink again, and again. Then, just four months in, the landlord announced he was getting divorced and selling the property and gave two months’ notice for the girls to leave. 

 

Anyone who has rented in London will know that what followed was a highly stressful, full-time effort to find a new home, and when they were picked from 300 other applicants when a new place came up, they swiftly exited their flat to grab the new one, meaning double rent for the remainder of their notice period. The lovely landlord didn’t give the girls a helping hand, given the inconvenience he’d caused, but then why should he? The scenario in which he should need to call time was all in the contract the girls had willingly signed. 

 

Why am I telling you this? Well, it reminded me of a frequent cry for help I see in my marketing WhatsApp group, “Team Marketing”. It’s usually relating to an unexplainable loss of control of an account; or a shifting of goalposts when it comes to reporting, campaign metrics or cost; or a change of algorithm which renders previously successful activity and approach suddenly redundant – and it’s always involving Facebook, Instagram or Google. 

 

And the risk of putting so many of our marketing eggs in the paid media (content promoted through paid placements like video ads, pay-per-click, pop-ups and sponsored social media posts) basket is that, like my friend’s daughter and her flatmate, we have zero control over anything which happens or could happen on those platforms. And that, from a revenue perspective, is very risky indeed. Because paid media is only ever rented, and that means we will always just have to get on with whatever they throw at us. 

 

Now, I’m in no way suggesting that you stop using paid media. I’m shortly to invest in a major paid media campaign of my own, but wouldn’t it be better to have a little more control over our marketing output and a bit more predictability around the results it will generate? A bit like our renters, owning a piece of their home to give them more security in and control over the place they live in, and the terms under which they do that. And the only up-front investment they would need to make would be the deposit. 

 

Well, buckle up, because you can! And if you’ve been collecting customer data from your WiFi, your orders or your bookings, your deposit is already sitting, just waiting to be used in your customer-relationship management. And that first-party data which you have collected is yours to use, because providing you’ve captured it in the right way, you own it and it’s yours to leverage whenever you like.

 

No hoops to jump through, no algorithms to fathom and no goalposts which might shift. Just trackable incremental revenue, while you get relevant and timely messaging into the hand of the targets you want to talk to most. So, make segmented, personalised and automated email a major part of your marketing strategy and regain some of the certainty and control your business and marketing needs in 2024.