It doesn’t take an economist or a rocket scientist to tell you that these are tough times for consumers and the hospitality sector. Traditionally, during such times, the pain heaped on quick service restaurants (QSR) and the value operators from losing budget-conscious diners who shift some of their spending to the grocery sector had been offset by higher-income diners trading down. 

 

There is undoubtedly some of this taking place, but in this current crisis, there is something of a more polarised market dynamic playing out. Affluent groups are insulated by the boom over recent years in global stock markets, which have enabled their savings to perform especially well and protected their healthy disposable incomes.

 

The net result of this scenario has been a declining market for QSR and fast food. Between 2024 and 2025, it fell 1.3%, according to Meaningful Vision, which found 66 of the top 130 brands suffered revenue declines and that any growth has been down to new store openings and not from like-for-like sales increases. 

 

To fight back, there has been a promotional bonanza from the QSR brands – and others on the periphery – despite the harsh inflationary environment. Meaningful Vision found 20% of all menu items are in meal deals, and 48% of all promotions are meal deals. Pushing such promotions helps shove people over the psychological threshold of £5 that customers are not too keen to cross. To counter such obstacles in the US, we’ve even seen McDonald’s launch bargain-basement $3 and $4 meal deals.

 

It’s clear that all this is centred on using price as a rather blunt instrument, but McDonald’s has been smarter with its location pricing, with Big Macs priced at between £4.79 and £5.79 (a 25% differential), depending on the price sensitivity in certain store locations based on competitors’ pricing data.

 

The company could be even smarter if it were to adopt dynamic pricing strategies. No doubt it is considering such actions, along with many other companies. A survey in 2025 by Toast found 70% of restaurants were “very or extremely interested” in implementing dynamic pricing, but only 7% were currently using the practice. 

 

And I bet you a Big Mac that these businesses are doing so under the radar, because any whiff of such activity is tantamount to a crime, judging by the media outcries we’ve been experiencing. When the Bank of England issued a statement recently suggesting 31% of companies in the UK plan to use tools for dynamic pricing in a year’s time, compared with 21% currently, it led to hysteria in the national press, with The Sun and other newspapers suggesting the end of civilisation is nigh.

 

The media’s opprobrium is no doubt driven to some extent by the very visible roll-out of electronic shelf edge labels by the major supermarkets. These enable prices to be adjusted centrally in seconds, as frequently as the supermarkets choose, thereby providing a platform for dynamic pricing were it to be implemented. And in my opinion, it will be because it simply makes a lot of sense – for consumers and for operators. 

 

Businesses I’ve discussed it with tell me it is not about increasing prices – so-called surge pricing – but is much more about decreasing prices to clear out perishable goods and reduce waste. Bakery goods are undoubtedly ground zero for implementing dynamic pricing. However, for room prices at pubs and inns, it can work the other way of course – to maximise revenue at peak times.

 

Martin Harley, owner of London Village Inns, was prompted to implement RoomPriceGenie to optimise the pricing of the rooms at his Black Lion pub in Kilburn – just down the road from Wembley where Oasis played some gigs. His rooms went for a fraction of the prices of the local competition on performance nights, and he realised that he was not running a charity, and so the new tool now enables him to flex his prices between £230 and £400 according to local demand.

 

Coincidentally, much of the recent downer on dynamic pricing activity has been fuelled by the Oasis ticket debacle. But in its investigation of the matter the Competition and Markets Authority found no evidence that such pricing activity had anything to do with it. The problem was that Ticketmaster did not tell fans waiting in lengthy queues that standing tickets were being sold at two different prices, and that prices would jump as soon as the cheap tickets sold out. Very naughty.

 

To date, we’ve had Wendy’s, Stonegate and others widely castigated for going public on using dynamic pricing – or merely mentioning to the media that they are thinking about doing so – despite there being an inevitability about it being widely used in the future because it enables operators to use data in order to be so much smarter in the way they price their products and services. 

 

It’s in no company’s interest to gouge their customers for a one-off margin gain that will kill any relationship they had with that individual. Hospitality companies need to hold their nerve and quietly investigate/adopt dynamic pricing, and in the meantime, let’s hope the mainstream media channels all grow up.

 

Some 60% of hospitality operators take more than a week to get a price change live across their estate. That single figure explains more about what this World Cup will cost the industry in missed margin, not missed footfall, than almost anything else.

 

The 2026 tournament should be a standout trading period. More fixtures than ever, both England and Scotland involved, six weeks of sustained attention, late-night kick-offs and extended trading hours. The demand will materialise. That's not the question. The question is whether businesses are set up to convert it into margin.

 

What Euro 2024 made clear, and what operators would do well to remember as they plan for 2026, is that not all tournament days are created equal. Hospitality Data Insights, tracking card spending across more than ten million consumers, found that delivery sales outperformed the prior 12-week trend by 5% across the tournament.

 

But that headline figure masked a sharper story underneath. Pubs and bars saw a 9% uplift on home nation match days, and a 4% decline on others. The demand didn't spread evenly across six weeks. It concentrated, predictably, around the fixtures that mattered to British fans.

 

That pattern will repeat in 2026, and it will be more pronounced, not less. With both England and Scotland in the tournament for the first time since 1998, operators have a genuine opportunity to run distinct, nation-specific strategies around fixtures that will each command different audiences, different dwell times and different ordering behaviour.

 

It's worth pausing, briefly, to acknowledge what might have been. Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland all fell at the play-off stage. Had all five home nations reached the finals, something that briefly looked possible, the commercial case would have been extraordinary. Every week of the tournament would have carried at least one fixture with genuine national investment behind it, sustaining the kind of demand that currently only clusters around England and Scotland games. That opportunity has passed, but it underlines just how significant home nation participation is as a commercial driver. Two nations in the tournament is a strong hand. Five would have been a full house.

 

Working with what’s there, the strategic opportunity is still substantial, but it requires operators to think about the tournament in segments rather than as a single six-week trading period.

 

England fixtures will drive the biggest spikes. These are the games that fill pubs, generate large group bookings and produce sharp surges in at-home ordering. Analytics firm Adjust found that food delivery app installs were 40% above the 2024 year-to-date average on the day of England's first match against Serbia at Euro 2024. 

 

Scotland fixtures will draw a different crowd, typically more distributed, arguably more passionate, and in many parts of the country, drawing audiences that England games simply don't. A pub in Edinburgh or Glasgow running the same proposition for a Scotland game, as it does for an England game, is leaving money on the table, in both directions.

 

The in-venue and at-home occasions behave differently across both sets of fixtures too. For England games, the pull toward communal viewing is strong – pubs, fan zones, watch parties – the shared experience of being somewhere when something happens. For Scotland games, particularly those with early or unusual kick-off times, the at-home occasion may be more dominant. 

 

Operators who treat all tournament fixtures identically – same menu, same pricing, same delivery proposition – will capture some of the demand. Those who tailor their offer to the fixture, the likely audience and the probable viewing behaviour will capture more of it.

 

The delivery channel is where this distinction becomes most commercially interesting. Unlike in-venue pricing, where adjustments are visible and require a degree of care, delivery menus can be structured differently by day without creating friction. A Scotland fixture on a Sunday afternoon calls for a different proposition than an England evening kick-off midweek – different group sizes, different food preferences, different timing around the match itself.

 

Just Eat's own data shows that UK customers place their highest volumes of orders on major football matchdays, with Champions League finals generating the platform's biggest single-day order spikes. Tournament football concentrates that behaviour, but only around the fixtures people care about.

 

This is where the execution question becomes unavoidable. The ability to run a genuinely fixture-specific strategy – adjusting pricing, restructuring delivery menus, shifting bundled offers between England and Scotland game days – depends entirely on whether operators can make those changes quickly enough for them to matter. If the process of updating a delivery menu takes several days, the window to act on a Scotland fixture announced at short notice, or to respond to a momentum shift mid-tournament as one nation progresses further than expected, is effectively closed before it opens.

 

Euro 2024 illustrated this clearly. The uplift was real, the data confirms it, and the concentration of that uplift around home nation fixtures makes it highly predictable. What it also showed was that operators who couldn't move, who were running the same proposition across the full tournament, absorbed the volume without necessarily capturing the margin that came with it.

 

The 2026 World Cup will be a stronger version of the same test. Two home nations, more fixtures, a longer window and enough predictability in the demand pattern that operators who plan fixture by fixture rather than tournament by tournament will have a genuine advantage. The commercial case for England and Scotland-specific strategies isn't complicated. The question, as ever, is whether the systems exist to execute them, and how quickly those decisions can go live.

 

For some businesses, it will be a strong trading period driven largely by demand. For others, those who have closed the gap between decision and deployment, it will be something more: a chance to operate with a precision that turns volume into margin.

Sometimes, we should always remind ourselves, life really can get better. It’s been 20 years since the smoking ban began its rollout across the UK, and would anyone seriously now wish that it hadn’t happened?

 

Well, yes, some would. Smoking remains a heavily politicised matter; a touchstone for our “freedoms”, our “right” to inflict pleasurable damage on ourselves. But only among a small minority, which I’ll risk infuriating by examining concrete results rather than abstract “principles”.

 

For the anniversary of the legislation, Public Health Scotland (PHS) has pulled together evidence of the impact of the 2006 ban on smoking in public places (Wales, Northern Ireland and England legislated similarly the following year), and it makes interesting reading.

 

But first, those of us who are old enough, let’s cast our minds back to the months and years before the ban, when the hospitality industry knew what was coming and was determined to stop it. 

 

The strategy of the AIR campaign, as it was called, was to attempt to put the sector’s house in order; to “remove the smoke, not the smoker” by introducing smoke-free zones, ventilation and air cleaning systems. It all got very technical, with endless discussion of “air-borne particulates” and diagrams showing how careful positioning of these measures could render smoke-free legislation redundant. Science would do the job.

 

It was most impressive. Goodness knows how much money was spent. You still sometimes see those vast air cleaning machines, like Thunderbird 2 or something, on the ceilings of pubs, and I did wonder during the pandemic whether they might have a role to play after all.

 

Anyway, despite a huge effort, with the industry pulling together like no time since the 1908 Licensing Bill, it didn’t work.

 

It’s worth noting that what really underpinned the legislation was not public health in general, but the need to protect workers behind the bar. After all, they had no choice about breathing in smoke, and they were doing it all day long.

 

The PHS report notes that 69% of bar staff were in favour of a ban, a figure that rose to 79% after it came in, and they found they suffered less from coughs, runny noses, shortness of breath and so on. 

 

There was, by contrast, little direct health impact on smokers, who would be free to smoke elsewhere. But the ban chimed with a societal change in attitude towards smoking that was already taking its inevitable course.

 

If the industry’s fears were correct, and the ban caused the mass closure of pubs, the benefits for workers would not mean so much. And I don’t doubt that some marginal wet-led businesses were tipped over the edge of viability if they weren’t able to adapt to the legislation.

 

But pubs have a strong history of rising to the challenges of regulation over hundreds of years, and it was fascinating to see “land-locked” premises suddenly discovering a yard they could convert into a “smoking solution” (an awful term that I don’t think helped). 

 

There were ingenious developments of outdoor areas that didn’t always quite conform to the maximum 50% enclosed rules, but blind eyes were sensibly turned in most cases. The point had been made, and compliance was nearly total.

 

As for trading, PHS concludes that, overall, smokers visited pub less often, but people who had previously been put off by the smoke started going more. Though food-led venues would have benefited most from that.

 

I remember my biggest concern at the time was for the invisible casualties, the old boys (they were mostly old boys) whose social live revolved around a pint and a fag down the pub and who really couldn’t face the effort of getting up and going outside when they wanted a smoke. So, they stayed, lonely, at home.

 

For others, as PHS points out, smoking areas provided a whole new social network where they met new friends. 

 

Curiously, the body could find only one piece of research that examined the immediate economic impact of the ban in Scottish pubs. That says that within one to two months, there was a 10% decline in sales and a 14% drop in customer numbers. That’s significant, and, in turn, it suggests spend per customer went up, reflecting a shift in the way pubs traded.

 

A follow-up study or two would have been interesting, but of course, we would soon be entering a recession with fresh challenges for pub operators, and the impact of the smoking ban would have been lost amidst that.

 

Today, there is no doubt in my mind that the pub is a better place for being smoke free. Was the industry right to fight the ban? I certainly thought so at the time. But that’s history for you. We never quite know how things are going to turn out.