It may sound fantastical but it is actually possible thanks to a new app called Peckish – just one of a plethora of emerging tech solutions, all designed to help you run your business smarter.
In today’s world, where pubs are facing extreme pressures – mostly out of their control – harnessing the latest technology to help streamline operations, reduce costs and improve the guest experience has never been more important.
The pace of innovation has accelerated rapidly in the past couple of years and now there are solutions to help with every aspect of running a pub or bar – and they’re not expensive or complicated to implement either.
Take Peckish, which is being adopted in particular by wet-led pub and bar operators across the UK thanks to its cost and time-cutting benefits.
Operators pay £39 per site per month, with no set-up fees, to use the app (with tailored packages available for larger groups).
Co-founder Harpreet Singh explains: “Given the high-volume, high-value nature of wet stock in pubs and bars, accurate stock-takes are mission-critical for cost control. With Peckish, teams simply film their shelves with our mobile app and it produces a live stock-count in minutes: this cuts stock-taking time by around 90% and improves accuracy by roughly 30% compared to manual counts.
“More importantly, that verified stock position becomes the foundation for everything that follows, from cost tracking and variance to ordering and replenishment. Peckish connects into the rest of a pub’s tech stack so that once the count is captured, the entire inventory workflow can be automated downstream.”
Anything that saves on admin time is going to help the bottom line, and Bookable is another tech solution that’s making a big difference to a growing number of pubs and bars.
Bookable provides a connectivity layer (for a £75 monthly platform fee) that sits between a venue’s reservation system and its third-party booking channels.
It integrates with major reservation systems such as Collins, ResDiary, SevenRooms and Zonal, enabling venues to connect their live availability to external partners through a single platform.
Once connected, third-party booking platforms can pull real-time availability, package, menu and pre-order requirements directly from a venue’s booking system and send confirmed bookings straight back into it, without any manual admin needed.
This means bookings, amendments and cancellations all happen automatically within the venue’s existing workflow.
It grows your database, triggers automated journeys like abandoned booking follow-ups and drives repeat visits.
Guestwise fractional marketing director James Mobbs
Bookable co-founder Chris Denman says: “For pub and bar operators, the main benefit is freeing up sales and operations teams from repetitive admin so they can focus on growing accounts and creating great products to sell, rather than spending hours every day copying bookings into booking systems or managing multiple inboxes and portals.
“It also creates a better experience for their customers, who are no longer being sold slots on third-party platforms that the venue cannot actually fulfil.”
He adds: “As an example, Bookable is used by Stonegate, which works with more than 300 third-party platforms and agencies, only three of which had integrations. We now provide the connectivity layer between them: by just managing The Fork bookings for Stonegate, we have saved them over 800 hours of manual admin time alone.”
Guest data capture grown
Automating responses to customer enquiries – whether by phone with a human-like AI voice agent like that provided by Alayic, or via a website chatbot, can really save your business time and money.
And in the case of a chatbot, it has the added bonus of enabling you to capture highly valuable customer data.
The AI platform Guestwise can manage incoming guest enquiries across your website, email, and social DMs 24/7. Its chatbot can answer FAQs, respond instantly to questions and even make, amend or cancel bookings – taking pressure off teams while improving the guest experience.
“Secondly, Guestwise helps venues maximise their marketing by turning guest data into smarter, more effective campaigns. It grows your database, triggers automated journeys like abandoned booking follow-ups and drives repeat visits through built-in loyalty, gamification and referral tools,” explains Guestwise fractional marketing director James Mobbs.
Among the pub and bar companies using Guestwise – with packages starting from £49 per site per month – are Mitchells & Butlers, Vintage Inns and Mission Mars.
Mission Mars markets and sales director James Newman says: “Guestwise’s tech brings a new level of personalisation that’s driving clear results. Guest data capture has grown significantly, helping us recover lost bookings and increase conversions.”
The importance of capturing guest data so you can use it to drive bookings should not be underestimated and there are many ways of doing this if you have the right tech in place.
Many pubs, including those belonging to Scotsman Group and Urban Village, have been reaping the benefits of Captive WiFi’s solution, which gathers data via a venue’s guest Wi-Fi.
Captive WiFi founder Adam Forman explains: “Most pubs already provide free Wi-Fi for their guests: Captive WiFi turns that existing infrastructure into a working asset rather than just a cost on the balance sheet.
“When guests connect to Wi-Fi, they share their name, email and mobile number through a simple login screen. We see 85% of guests opting into marketing this way, compared to roughly 30% through other methods like bookings or paper forms.
“This happens automatically with every connection, so your team doesn’t need to ask guests to sign up for anything or manage data entry manually.”
Once the data has been captured, the system handles the follow-up, for instance automatically sending out birthday offers, sending out a “we miss you” message to a guest who hasn’t visited in 60 days, or a reminder about the next quiz night for someone who came to the previous one.
Captive WiFi tracks visit frequency so you can see who your true regulars are and who’s visiting for the first time, and it connects with loyalty platforms, CRM tools like Airship, Klaviyo and Mailchimp, and reservation systems.
[This tech helps] operators keep tighter control of labour costs while also cutting their admin workload so they can focus more on customer service.
Tabology managing director Phil Neale
Forman says: “We often talk about the ‘cost of inaction’ with operators: every guest who connects to your Wi-Fi and walks out without leaving their details is a missed opportunity for a follow-up visit. Over months and years, that adds up to significant lost revenue from guests who might have returned with the right nudge.
Urban Village Pubs marketing manager Daniel Keen adds: “Over the past six months, we’ve consistently seen around an 80% opt-in rate to our growing CRM, with Captive WiFi users now accounting for around 40% of our total email subscribers.”
For any hospitality business, labour remains one of the largest controllable costs and also one of the hardest to manage.
Hour-by-hour visibility
Traditional scheduling often relies on fixed templates or manager instinct, which can lead to overstaffing during quiet periods and rushed service during peaks.
However, modern workforce technology allows pubs to forecast demand using live sales data and build schedules that reflect what is happening on the floor.
Nory AI CEO Conor Sheridan explains: “This gives managers visibility hour by hour, helping them understand how staffing aligns with demand and make adjustments before costs creep up.
“Forecasting has historically been difficult in pubs, particularly where weather, events and seasonality play such a big role but improved forecasting technology is also helping operators plan with far greater accuracy: by analysing historical sales patterns alongside live data, pubs can forecast demand at a much more granular level, affecting everything from staffing and prep to ordering and cash flow.
“Instead of relying on hindsight, operators are planning ahead with confidence – reducing waste, avoiding last-minute changes and giving teams clearer direction day to day.”
Like Nory, long-established EPoS provider Tabology is also embracing the power of AI to improve scheduling, having recently added a function to its staff scheduling module, which generates accurate sales forecasts at the click of a button by combining data from previous sales with upcoming bookings.
Managing director Phil Neale explains: “These are pulled through to the rota, which then calculates your projected wage/sales percentages as you build it.
“This has the dual benefit of helping operators keep tighter control of labour costs while also cutting their admin workload, so they can focus more on customer service.”
Of course, improving the way you organise rotas doesn’t just help you keep control of costs, it also leads to a more contented workforce, thus aiding staff retention and reducing recruitment and training spend.
Fair and transparent distribution of tips is another key factor in keeping staff happy (while also complying with the law) and this is an area where new tech is emerging to smooth the process.
For example, the digital tipping platform URocked seamlessly integrates tipping into the payment process. It improves tip income by three times on average and ensures 100% of tips are distributed fairly based on the splitting method preferred by teams (for example hours worked, equal, weighted points, etc).
Escapism Bars managing director Grant Dexter says: “We’ve been using URocked in our bars since May 2024 and it has been a game-changer. It’s streamlined our tipping process and significantly increased the number of tips our teams receive.
“It’s easy, efficient, and a must-have for any hospitality business.”
URocked is free for operators (customers pay a 5% processing fee on top of the tip at checkout) and integrates seamlessly with existing technologies for payments, HR, tax, PoS, and mobile.
It is also highly user-friendly, which is an essential requirement for any new tech you choose.
Indeed, Fi Sellick, head of UK strategy at hospitality tech supplier Square, advises tech needs to have an “intuitive interface” – like that of Square’s – so it can be easily adopted by staff.
It also needs to genuinely make their job roles easier.
She adds: “When staff feel supported by the technology rather than slowed down by it, they’re more likely to stay, perform well and deliver great experiences to customers.”
Case study: Lessons in training staff
Finding the time to train staff, especially when turnover is high, is a real challenge in hospitality, but some recent developments in the tech space could be the answer to a pub or bar’s prayers.
Brandee, the drinks brand training and rewards app, was born out of a shared feeling of pain experienced by co-founders Becky McCabe and James Bates.
Bates had previously worked with brands like Coors, Rekorderlig and Big Drop. He strived to secure national listings but then came the real challenge: how to deliver brand training to 2,000 staff across 200 venues.
McCabe, with a background in hospitality management at operators including Patty & Bun and Rose Pubs, faced her own struggle: tight wage budgets and packed schedules made it nearly impossible to pull staff off the floor for training days.
So, staff wanted to learn, brands wanted to train – and that’s when Brandee was born.
“We built Brandee to make brand training easier, faster and more rewarding,” says McCabe.
Using Brandee, staff complete bite-sized, mobile-friendly quizzes, learning on the go whenever it suits them. In return, they earn real rewards – from vouchers and merchandise to exclusive tickets.
Lane7 head of marketing Victoria Gottschalk says: “I think what Brandee is doing is pretty revolutionary. We’ve used them for nearly a year and can’t recommend them enough. Because the app rewards front of house/bartenders for learning more about the drinks they serve, it drives engagement massively, increases spend per head with upsells and makes for a much better experience for both guests and staff.”
“Conventional training can be quite boring but gamified training is compulsive and competitive", Star Pubs operator Jamie Foster
‘Gamified training’ on smartphones is also being deployed at Star Pubs, thanks to a £135,000 investment in a ‘gamified training portal’ for the company’s leased and tenanted (L&T) sites.
The portal offers courses on social media, interview skills, delivering great customer service and improving the customer journey to name a few, and the results have been “spectacular” according to Star Pubs head of training Tracy Bickerdike.
“Gamification modules take a fraction of the time of traditional training – for example, they cut six hours off completion of induction and compliance training for new starters while comprehensive age verification for gaming machines training can now be done in five minutes, rather than the 30 minutes required with e-learning,” she says.
The modules are bite-sized, fun and use repetition to embed learning.
Star Pubs has committed to making a further ongoing annual investment of almost £50,000 into course content creation.
Jamie Foster, who operates three Star pubs in Southend-on-Sea, says the gamified training courses are “amazing”.
“Conventional training can be quite boring but gamified training is compulsive and competitive, just like playing a game on your phone,” Foster states.
“It’s great for training new staff from the get-go as well as refreshing existing team members on little things that are easy to forget but can make all the difference to customer service.
“We’ve saved on labour too: rather than having to set aside two or three hours to train people, they can do it on their phones in quiet moments during their shifts.”
