No shows are "devastating" says Fordingbridge pub owner
A quarter of customers didn't turn up on one night over the weekend
Last updated 27th Apr 2021
The owner of The George in Fordingbridge says people not turning for their pre-booked times is "devastating" and "upsetting".
On Saturday night (April 24th) 30 out of the 120 people booked in didn't show up.
That's 25% of their current capacity, on their busiest day of the week.
Caroline Roylance had turned away hundreds of people who had tried to reserve a table but couldn't because they were fully booked,
Caroline told Greatest Hits Radio:
"We'd been fully booked for Saturday night since Thursday so in that time I probably turned away around 400 people, I constantly took phone calls from people wanting tables that I didn't have tables for. We had 120 people booked and 30 didn't turn up which was just devastating, it's our busiest day of the week, it was really upsetting.
We're already running with 50% more staff than usual, we're having to do full table service, I pay one person all day to take people's details down for Track and Trace, so we are already running with way more staff than we usually would and not really turning a profit but you know we're open and we want to be open and we want to be here for our customers so on the busiest night of the week for 25% of our customers to just not turn up just affects our bottom line. People spend about £30 a head maybe more so it's about £1,000 we lost and we had the food for them, the drinks for them, we had the staff to serve them, we had the chefs to cook the food, just really really upsetting."
PLEA TO CANCEL BOOKINGS
With demand for pubs high after lockdown and them only able to customers outside, many people are pre-booking tables a few days or weeks in advance their plans can change closer to the time.
Caroline is asking anyone who finds themselves in this situation to make sure they cancel the table so that others don't miss out.
Whether you book via the phone, a website, Facebook or email the simplest thing to do is cancel the same way.
Pub's have had a difficult time over the last year, spending much of it closed, so need all the help they can get.