I’ve spent a good part of my working life (almost all of it, actually) in pubs, bars and hospitality. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate just how important a good pub can be to the people around it.
It doesn’t have to be the fanciest place, have the biggest drinks selection or the most expensive refurbishment. It just has to be a genuinely good pub.
Of course, what makes a pub ’good’ depends entirely on who you ask.
Take a little country pub in a rural village. It might be the only place for miles where people can get together. Somewhere locals have been drinking for generations, the landlord knows everyone’s name and the weekly quiz is practically a village institution.
For one person, visiting that pub might be their main social interaction of the day. For another, it’s where they meet friends, celebrate a birthday or escape the house for a couple of hours.
A city centre pub is a different offer altogether. Different customers, different atmosphere and a much faster pace. It might be full of office workers on a Friday evening, tourists on a Saturday afternoon or friends meeting before a night out.
Then there’s the sports pub, where complete strangers become best mates for ninety minutes over a game of footy. Or the food led pub where three generations of a family gather for Sunday lunch.
They’re all very different businesses, serving very different people, but they have one thing in common. They’re places people want to be and I think that’s something we sometimes forget when talking about the pub industry.
Service and hospitality aren’t the same thing
Having worked on both sides of the bar and spent a fair amount of time as a customer, there’s a distinction I’ve always felt strongly about. Service and hospitality are not the same thing.
We often use the words as though they’re interchangeable. They aren’t.
Service is the process. Taking an order, pouring a pint, delivering the food, clearing the table and getting the bill right. It’s providing what someone has paid for. You can get good service at a supermarket checkout.
Hospitality is something different. It’s how you make that person feel.
It’s remembering someone’s usual drink, noticing that somebody sitting alone might appreciate a conversation or having a laugh with regulars who’ve been coming in every Friday for years.
Sometimes good hospitality is simply knowing when to leave people alone.
You can deliver flawless service and still give somebody a completely forgettable experience. Equally, we’ve all been somewhere that hasn’t got everything right. The food took longer than expected, the bar was busy, something went wrong. But the team were brilliant, the atmosphere was fantastic and you left feeling you’d had a great time.
That’s hospitality, and in my opinion it’s the most important thing we do.
You can deliver flawless service and still give somebody a completely forgettable experience.
What makes it special is that it looks different in every pub. The welcome that works in a village local might be completely wrong for a busy late night bar.
The skill is understanding your customers, your community and what makes them feel welcome.
You can’t write hospitality into a procedure
This is something I think we’re in danger of forgetting as an industry.
We spend a lot of time developing standards, procedures, training programmes and systems designed to make our businesses more consistent.
And rightly so. Standards are important. Customers should know what to expect, and teams need to understand how to do their jobs properly.
But there’s a difference between teaching someone how to deliver good service and giving them the confidence to deliver genuine hospitality.
You can teach somebody how to pour the perfect pint, take an order or follow a sequence of service. What you can’t do is hand them a checklist that tells them exactly how to make every customer feel special.
People are different. Situations are different. Hospitality requires a bit of personality, common sense and the freedom to make decisions.
I want the person behind the bar to feel comfortable having a laugh with a regular. I want a team member to recognise when someone’s having a difficult day and take a moment to speak to them. And I want managers to feel confident giving their teams the freedom to do those things.
Not because a training manual told them to, but because they understand what good hospitality looks and feels like.
That means trusting people.
Of course there need to be boundaries, and not everyone will get every decision right. But I’d much rather have a team who occasionally make a mistake while trying to do something good for a customer than one that’s too frightened to do anything beyond the minimum expected of them.
If we take away people’s ability to show some personality, we shouldn’t be surprised when every pub starts to feel the same.
Have we become too obsessed with the numbers?
I ask this as an operations person, not someone who thinks the commercial side doesn’t matter.
I spend a huge amount of my working life looking at sales figures, labour percentages, margins, forecasts and budgets. I know those numbers matter. Pubs cannot survive without making money but I do wonder whether we’ve become so focused on controlling costs and protecting margins that we’re losing sight of what makes a pub successful in the first place.
If managers are constantly being asked to reduce labour, minimise costs and squeeze another percent profit from the business, at what point do we start taking away their ability to look after customers properly?
Hospitality takes time and people.
Teams need enough breathing room to create an atmosphere, get to know their customers and do more than simply process transactions. That doesn’t mean ignoring commercial performance. Far from it. I believe great hospitality and strong commercial results should go hand in hand. But too often hospitality is treated as a cost to be managed rather than the very thing that brings people through the door.
For our industry, that’s a dangerous place to be.
Give people a reason to come back
There’s a marketing lesson in all of this too.
We spend an enormous amount of time trying to attract new customers through social media, promotions, events and advertising. It’s important. I work with businesses on precisely those things. But I think the most useful marketing question a pub can ask is much simpler.
Why would somebody want to come back?
The best Instagram page in the world means very little if the experience inside the pub is poor.
On the other hand, a pub that understands its customers and delivers genuine hospitality creates its own advocates. People talk about places they love. They bring friends, recommend them to colleagues and choose to spend their time there and that sort of loyalty is worth far more than getting somebody through the door once.
It also comes from having the confidence to be distinctive.
Not every pub needs to appeal to everybody. A traditional local shouldn’t have to become a trendy cocktail bar to survive. A sports pub shouldn’t apologise for being full of football supporters, and a village pub shouldn’t lose its character chasing a completely different market.
Understand who you are and who your customers are. Then be really bloody good at giving them what they want.
The people make the pub
I wholeheartedly believe pubs are among the most important parts of British hospitality, and I’d hate to see us lose what makes them special but, if we’re serious about protecting them, we need to look beyond simply keeping the buildings open.
We need sustainable businesses, supported teams and communities that feel their pubs belong to them. We need to give people the training to do their jobs properly, but also the freedom and confidence to make the experience their own and we need to stop treating hospitality as something that happens automatically once the operational standards have been ticked off.
Commercial performance matters, absolutely. But so does the human side of our industry.
You don’t build a great pub with a spreadsheet. You build it with people.
Get that part right and the customers, the communities and, more often than not, the commercial results will follow.
That’s the kind of pub industry I want to be part of, and those are, in my opinion, the pubs people will actually want to visit.
