A new year is a good opportunity to right past wrongs, and this hack felt that the phrase “vibes-based” was sorely underused in 2025. That there is wording out there allowing you to say any old nonsense without backing it up, just general “mood”, is most appealing and will be rectified at once.

So it was that the festive period came with the chance to talk about “vibes-based societal and economic change” – pause for applause – courtesy of a survey of two different households, both of whom hosted American house hunters at their Devon homes over Christmas. Both alike in dignity, as they say in Romeo and Juliet, these wannabe expats were responding to the ancient grudge of having to share a country with Donald Trump and felt an exit was required.

Both hosting parties reported a fair amount of driving around narrow streets in inclement weather, being forced to explain phrases like “septic tank” and “technical double glazing”, much to the disappointment of their guests. “I had to point out that ‘The Holiday’ wasn’t a docudrama,” one related, as cottages within commuter distance of London for the salary of a newspaper journalist went unfound. 

“The Holiday” has a great deal to answer for, as anyone who has seen it will attest, but are we, as a sector, also guilty of thinking of vibes first and facts later? The hotel sector has been vibing for thousands of years, to the extent that it has only just acknowledged the internet.

It took the online travel agents charging 30% to sell rooms for a couple of decades before hotels were properly motivated to action, but they’re getting there. What helped hotels to grasp the issue at hand was that they’re not high street businesses. True, they’re often found on the high street, but they’re not a product used by local people. They may as well be invisible; just a random box that offers minimum wage jobs to passing students. 

They grasped that bringing hotels to the attention of the guest called for more than just vibes and, since realising they needed to freeze on to that 30%, hotels have created a whole industry around winning the war for attention. The larger hotel groups are no longer real estate companies, they are platforms. Their business model is created around attracting hotel owners and renting out their brand in return for annual fees on the promise that they can fill beds cheaper than anyone else. 

To do this, they have built estates of, in the case of Accor, almost 50 brands, including not only hotels, but luxury trains, technology and events. The new hotel model is not about the property or even the thread count; it’s about ensuring that, once they have you, they’re never letting you go.

Accor’s chairman and chief executive Sébastien Bazin has been talking for several years about creating a world in which the group has daily touchpoints with its guests. Daily, not annually. To drive this, the group’s loyalty tentacles have been extending into every realm of hospitality, with the goal that you will be earning and burning points on your daily latte.

The best hotel group by far at daily touching is also the largest, in Marriott. In 2024, it reported credit card branding fees of $660m, forecast to increase by 9% in 2025. The group has partnerships with Starbucks, Uber, Lufthansa and tens of others. At the end of last year, chief executive Tony Capuano talked about getting into airport lounges. Accor has co-working brands, while one of the other big groups is rumoured to be considering student housing. 

The hotel sector has come a long way from hoping the internet was a fad. It now wants to be your first port of call when considering hospitality, and to do this, it is sacking off vibes entirely. They want to tell you where to get your coffee (and earn points), where to get your lunch (and earn points) and which late-night venue to get your Uber to (and earn points twice over).

In the short term, this is brilliant news for M&A lawyers, as there is only one slot available to be what is effectively the Amazon of hotels. Where does it leave pubs and restaurants? Loyalty programmes are only just being talked about, and those out there are single use cases: eat meal, get points. Other than putting specialty buns on Instagram, attracting attention is still in the realms of hoping your charming village pub is featured in “The Holiday” or a rural murder drama. 

Should a Marriott or a Hilton do a deal with, say, a Fuller’s, they have the potential to lock a whole section of the guest community into their ecosystem and out of the passing foot trade. Do you want to spend the rest of your trading life playing the plucky independent bookshop to Jeff Bezos’s monolith? It’s time to ditch the vibes. 

So, a lower drink-drive limit is back on the agenda for England and Wales. We’ve been here before, but my guess is that the government’s consultation – launched, not coincidentally, I suspect, at the start of Dry January – could well result in the change going through this time.

Predictably, fresh concerns about what this will mean for country pubs have hit the headlines of the mainstream media, while the industry could be forgiven for seeing it as yet another policy measure threatening to weigh down on its ability to trade profitably.

 

Since the 80mg limit was set in 1967, governments have shied away from reducing it because it was unclear what further gains could be made. In combination with a handy means of enforcement, the breathalyser – much simpler and more effective than taking a suspect back to the police station and asking them to walk along a straight line painted on the floor – it was extremely effective. 

 

Between 1979 and 2015, drink drive deaths fell by 88%. At which point, progress halted. It was assumed that the remaining 12% were a resilient core of drink drivers whose bad habit began before the hard-hitting advertising campaigns of the 1970s took hold. 

 

But now, it seems that a younger generation feels less ashamed about getting behind the wheel after a drink. Or, indeed, after consuming some other psychoactive substance. Drug driving is a fast-growing worry. It appears young people are not so goody-two-shoes as we thought – and there are signs, too, that they are drinking more in general.

 

As wine writer Henry Jeffreys has described well in his Drinking Cultures blog, half a century ago, drink driving was something people did without really thinking about it.

 

Having a car was a condition of getting my first job in journalism as a reporter on a local paper in 1976 (I was a child prodigy). And, like many of my peers, I would drive after a few pints, giving non-drivers lifts home as well as getting myself back from the pub. I survived and was breathalysed only once. It was a scary moment. The kindly officer told me I was “borderline” and let me carry on.

 

I don’t enjoy driving. It was 40 years before I bought my second car, and I’m very careful now, I believe. I might have a weak pint, but more often it’s just the half. I’m a living experiment in how behaviours can change.

 

Now, with drink-drive fatalities ticking up again – in 2023, an estimated 260 people died – fears that we are, as a population, in danger of slipping back into the old habits could be enough to swing the debate in favour of a lower 50mg limit, bringing England and Wales into line with most of the world.

 

In particular, we can look to the experience in Scotland, where a 50mg limit was introduced in 2014. The strange thing about this, though, in the words of a 2021 academic paper in the Journal of Health Economics referenced in the government’s argument for change, is that “this reduction had no effect on drink driving and road collisions”. The authors speculate that this is because of a lack of affordable alternative transport and “weak law enforcement”.

 

So, a lower limit is not, by itself, the answer. And it’s true that it’s just one of many measures in the government’s strategy to improve road safety. Not that I can see better public transport in there.

 

The consultation promises “stronger enforcement” and, interestingly, suggests that the lower limit in Scotland does “appear to have strengthened public attitudes against drink-driving and reinforced the behavioural change message of don’t drink and drive”.

 

It also says that “there was no impact on the drinks and entertainment industry”, which appears to be a simple extrapolation from the lack of evidence that there was any impact on drink-driving. The Scottish trade might beg to differ. Anecdotally, at least, a lower limit did affect patterns of trade outside the big cities as, for instance, commuters driving home no longer called in for a pint at a pub on their way.

 

If it happens in England and Wales, certain businesses are likely to be affected more than others. Rural pubs have long adapted to the introduction of the breathalyser by turning to food, but it would be a shame if they lost some of the buzz of banter from drinking customers.

On this occasion, though, with lives at stake, we are probably going to have to accept that the mood for change will win out.

For a few weeks some years back, I worked in Blackfriars and would walk to Holborn tube as my route home because it took me past The Seven Stars in Carey Street, behind the Royal Courts of Justice. After only a couple of nights of stop-offs in this lovely compact pub, the landlady had named me “the man with the FT”, as I would invariably be carrying a copy of the paper.

 

The pub’s landlady/owner is the legendary Roxy Beaujolais, a punchy character who has over the years created a unique venue. With a nickname, it felt like I’d been welcomed into the fold by The Seven Stars’ main star. There is no doubt it is a wonderfully historical pub, but that doesn’t keep the regulars regular. It’s the people behind our bars who are the real draw.

 

My family often joke that I always seem to know the people serving us in the pubs and restaurants that we visit. It’s not because I’m out every night of the week (although I try my best), it’s because I typically like to frequent those places where I’ve got to know the owners/managers or landlord/landlady. It is these types who care about their customers, and they will have fully engaged with me when I’ve visited.

 

Whenever I’m in Soho, I try to pop into the Coach & Horses, where Ali Ross oversees one of London’s most famous pubs. It would be so easy for this place to be run as a tourist-driven venue – for non-returners – but it is the opposite. Ross is a great presence at the pub who ensures there is a welcome for all-comers – regulars and tourists alike. Proof of her methods can be seen in her currently holding The Griffin Trophy – awarded by Fuller’s to its pub of the year from its 330-plus venues. And she has won it twice at different venues.

 

She follows in the footsteps of another great Soho landlady, Lesley Lewis, who has been running the French House for more than 30 years. Testament to her ability to welcome customers is the fact she reckons 80% of her drinkers are regulars, despite it being on the tourist trail. 

 

Knowing your customers is certainly an art, and Mark Crowther, chair of Portobello Pub Company, recalls a strategy called the 100 Club at one of his former employers, whereby the manager had to know the names of 100 customers and a detail about each of them. For the most engaged managers, there was also a 200 Club.

 

As pub companies have come under pressure, the ability to attract the most capable managers and landlords/landladies has undoubtedly become a greater challenge. It’s been the same for the front-of-house at restaurants, where the career maître d’ has become a rare beast nowadays. Since chefs became the focus of attention, the role of the key relationship driver on the restaurant floor has been diminished. 

 

I can recall being served by front-of-house legends including Silvano Giraldin at Le Gavroche, Fred Sirieix at Galvin at Windows, Jean-Claude Breton at Gordon Ramsay and Elena Salvoni at Elena’s Etoile. The art of the maître d’ seems to have almost died out, but maybe we are seeing a return to service, fun and hospitality being a key part of dining out rather than it all being about the food.

 

Front-of-house maestro Jeremy King is rolling out his renowned brand of hospitality across his various new London venues, and he has been joined by Martin Kuczmarski, who has created runaway winners The Dover, Martino’s and very recently The Dover Street Counter, which are all based around the joy of slick front-of-house service. Other notables include Daniel Crump, proprietor of The Greyhound in Beaconsfield, who is a front-of-house whirlwind in the industry.

 

The need to give a richer experience for customers has also been identified by the large hospitality brands across quick service restaurants (QSR) and casual dining, as the process has arguably been too focused on speed and ease in recent years. This can lead to a lack of brand identity and a weak relationship with the customers.

 

Dane Mathews, chief digital and technology officer at Taco Bell, has recognised the issue. He said: “There is no way I can make a consumer experience memorable with a bunch of screens and artificial intelligence. They’ll be better, but I don’t know if they’ll necessarily be memorable.” He’s identified that it’s ultimately the people on the front line that make the difference. Assisting him is the company’s loyalty programme, which is increasingly being used as a tool for helping businesses with more transient workforces and less engaged customers to leverage some personality into the mix.

 

Whether it is through employees using a loyalty programme in QSR brands, maître d’s returning to the fold in restaurants or the welcoming embrace of owners/managers in pubs, it is these elements that are fundamental to driving frequency. Nothing new really in the fact that it continues to be all about the people.

Apology: In last week's (16 January) Friday Opinion (Child's Play) by Glynn Davis, the article described the introduction of a policy at the William the Fourth pub in Leyton where children are banned from 7pm onwards as “discriminatory”. We accept this was the wrong language and would like to apologise to the owners of the William the Fourth, Exale Brewing Company, for any offence caused.