‘Tis the season… for parties and celebrations! As a restaurant owner or manager, the lead-up to Christmas is a great opportunity to take bookings and turn a profit. Especially if you tap into businesses looking to reward employees with a Christmas party.
Dining pods will give your restaurant a unique selling point all year round – and they’re very popular for festive celebrations. Discover how they can elevate bookings and place your restaurant front of mind with local companies that may well return year after year.
Increase Corporate Christmas Bookings
If you have outdoor space to make use of, pod dining is a win-win for your restaurant and those lucky guests that get to experience it. It’s something different that your restaurant can offer at a time of year when many people like to feast and make merry (and spend more money). Here are five ways you can boost bookings and profits with dining in a dome.
1. Create Additional Capacity With Outdoor Dining Pods
Normally, you’ll only take bookings for inside your restaurant during winter. However, dining pods allow you to use your outside area as well, meaning you can expand your floor space and take more bookings.
To give you an idea of how many guests you could seat comfortably inside a dining pod, the Hypedome S is the perfect size for merry gatherings of up to eight people. And the Hypedome M can take fourteen. Adding domes to your offering means you can seat more guests – and ultimately, reap more profit.
2. Offer Privacy Via Dining in a Dome
Dome dining is a gloriously private experience – much more so than a booth inside a restaurant because guests are completely enclosed in their own bubbles.
You can host several company Christmas parties simultaneously if you invest in multiple dining pods, and guests can celebrate as joyously and loudly as they like without disturbing anyone else.
3. Make Your Outdoor Igloos Festive
Creating a holly-jolly atmosphere for outdoor dining pods is easy. Their shape is reminiscent of real-life igloos, and once you add the Hypedome lighting kit and Christmassy decorations, they’re something of an intimate winter wonderland.
Dining pods can easily be branded with a corporate logo and merchandise and are much easier to decorate than an entire section of your restaurant. (See lots of tips for decorating dining pods in our winter outdoor dining guide for restaurants.)
4. Provide a Special Christmas Menu for Pod Dining
By offering a set two-course or three-course menu and inviting guests to order in advance, you can streamline your kitchen operations and turn covers quickly. Most corporate parties expect a set menu, and if it’s delicious and includes traditional, yet unique Christmas fare, you’ll surely make your guests happy.
Consider offering a free glass of bubbly or Bucks Fizz on arrival – it’s a nice gesture that’ll help get the office Christmas party started.
5. Make it Easy for Corporate Guests
Corporates looking for a place to host their Christmas party don’t want to get their tinsel in a tangle over the organisation of it. They just want the booking and the event itself to be managed well, so there’s less for them to do.
So, make it easy to book online and collect deposits. Provide Christmas crackers for the table and a goody for each guest to take away. Put a speaker inside each of your outdoor dining pods and play festive songs to help guests get into the Christmas spirit. Arrange to have branded merchandise dropped off or collected and place it inside the domes yourself.
Christmas is Coming… So Plan for Dining Pods Now
Dining in a dome is a memorable experience, perfect for parties during the festive season. Many businesses are looking for something a bit different (and grand) when they book the office Christmas party as a way of saying ‘thank you’ to staff who’ve slogged throughout the last 12 months.
Intimate outdoor dining pods allow for a fantastic bonding experience between employees and will be something they’ll remember and talk about before the event – and long afterwards into the New Year.
Finally, pod dining works brilliantly to create brand awareness. Your corporate guests will be snapping away, taking plenty of photos of your beautiful dining pods, and then they’ll probably share them on social media. That’s essentially free marketing that could lead to even more bookings and have your restaurant’s cash register jingling all the way!