Charging for New Year's Eve is damaging trade
Has the industry damaged New Year's Eve? I have noticed a steady decline in trade on New Year's Eve ever since the Millennium, and last New Year's Eve was no exception.
While I appreciate that on the eve of the millennium expenses may have warranted charging customers to enter your pub, and for some maybe increasing prices, I cannot see a normal pub would or should charge an entry fee on New Year's Eve.
I should add that as a company we did not elect to charge an entry fee on NYE nor have we done so since. I agree costs may be slightly higher on NYE, but are sales not also increased?
With more charging an entry fee on NYE, all this is doing is putting customers off going out on what should be the busiest night of the year.
The last NYE especially should have been one that pubs wanted customers to be out celebrating. The adverse weather conditions at the start of December did not help anyone and a year where Christmas Day and New Year's Day both fell on a Saturday meant that December was always going to return lower-than-forecast sales.
Why, with that in mind, would anyone then want to put off potential customers by charging them to enter your pub?
We all know that January is maybe the toughest month in the pub industry. So should pubs not be encouraging customers?
I feel that charging an entry fee on NYE sends out the wrong message. What the pub may gain on the one night, they may lose during January and maybe for months to follow. After all, it is a lot easier to lose an existing customer than it is get a new one. We have to look after what we have, as well as attracting new customers.
The Christmas period for 2011 looks a little more promising with both Christmas Eve and NYE falling on a Saturday. So, hopefully, we should all have good trading periods — not only three Fridays and Saturdays over the holiday period, but also on the days in between.
I would suggest that licensees think hard about whether to charge or not next NYE. If you are wondering why your sales have gone down on NYE or during January, then if you charged, or pubs around you charged, then that might be a contributing factor.
Michael Kheng is managing director of bar group Kurnia
