Events are a key strategy for attracting diners, that 42% of venue operators are planning to use this year, according to Beyond the Booking 2025 data.
The main motivations for dining out in 2025 are celebrations (76%), spending time with friends (70%), and spending time with family (67%). Which makes one thing abundantly clear: the social value of dining out is a higher priority for diners than the food aspect.
So, it’s time for restaurants to diversify their offering and incorporate events in their growth initiatives to maximise bookings and revenue growth.
And in order to capitalise on all the benefits of hosting restaurant events in your venue, you need a comprehensive restaurant event management software to help. ResDiary offers event enquiry management, branded communications, pre-payment functionality and much more.
Keep reading to discover how to include events in your strategy for success.
Restaurant events are a fantastic way for your business to grow and expand, diversifying your offering and enticing diners through the door.
In 2024, 14% of operators chose to repurpose their venue and 10% considered doing so. This trend looks to continue, as 21% say they are considering repurposing their venue in 2025. With all the challenges that the hospitality industry is facing, restaurants are acknowledging that they need to diversify their offering to ensure success - as good food and service isn't enough to cut it anymore.
That’s why 42% of venue operators in the UK and Ireland plan to run events this year. A big increase from last year, where only 25% of respondents ran events to attract diners to their venues.
The benefits of running events at your restaurant include:
There are lots of restaurant event ideas that you can use to attract diners who want a unique experience. Think quiz nights, paint and sip nights, open mic nights, bottomless brunches, maybe even speed dating.
But the key is to use this inspiration to host the right events for your venue and the diners you want to attract. If you have a lot of vegan diners, create a plant-based tasting menu evening. If you are drawing in a lot of families, you could host an all-ages pizza night.
The key to revenue growth in times where the cost of operations is going up, is to put money and effort behind the initiatives that will really drive impactful returns, rather than spreading yourself too thin. So always ensure events align with your restaurant mission and make them count.
Or download our Beyond the Booking 2025 report to see what other promotions venue operators are using to tackle the challenges on the horizon.
Once you’ve decided to incorporate events into your strategy, it’s crucial that you set yourself up for success with an event management software to manage them effectively and efficiently.
ResDiary’s event management software offers many features to aid your event planning process and ensure success:
Beyond the Booking 2025 data highlights that diners prefer to place bookings directly via a venue’s website, with 79% using this method. So, venues should prioritise online methods to accept event bookings.
This can present issues for businesses that still use more analogue systems, as more than a quarter (29%) of diners are turned off by the inability to book online, with 27% prioritising a different restaurant if forced to call or email a venue, and 2% disregarding the venue altogether.
With ResDiary promotions, you can integrate your event booking into your restaurant's website with customisable widgets that keep the booking process simple and contained.
You can easily manage a wide array of event types, allowing diners to book for afternoon tea, or steak night, or any other promotional event you might be running. All in one easy booking location. The booking then pulls through to your diary with all relevant event information attached, so you can effectively prep and plan.
For bigger events that require ticketing rather than just booking, ResDiary’s partnership with Tonic allows you to easily do this and keep everything seamlessly integrated with a widget on your website.
Using this, you can sell tickets 24/7 and rely on the mobile ticket scanning app, which is perfect for bigger events like musical entertainment, or outside providers coming to your venue.
Behind booking directly via a venue's website, the next most preferred method of booking was using third-party booking platforms (67%).
DesignMyNight is one of the UK's most popular hospitality discovery search engines, with 3.9 million users searching for that perfect event or dining out spot each month.
ResDiary’s integration with DesignMyNight can help you take advantage of this audience and boost exposure for your venue and any events you might be hosting, marketing your listing page to diners who are searching for your location, venue type, event theme, and more.
Put your brand in front of the right audience and watch the bookings roll in.
You don't want to be run off your feet when your event comes around, stretching your team too thin and risking not delivering your normal excellent standard of service. That's where a restaurant event management software with pre-order and custom menu features comes in.
Pre-orders can be a great way to manage your event more efficiently, easing the workload of your team and guaranteeing that guests receive their preferred dishes.
ResDiary's pre-order menu option supports with this, improving time management, reducing wait times, increasing inventory control, and, most importantly, boosting customer and staff satisfaction.
You can also set up custom menus tailored to different event types. This means that for an event like a three-course charity dinner or bottomless brunch, you can create a simplified set-menu with refined options, rather than letting diners select from your entire menu.
This makes it considerably easier for your team to prep and deliver the food, and for you to manage inventory in advance and ensure you have all products and menu items available to avoid disappointing customers.
Providing custom menus for events also means that dietary needs can be communicated at time of booking rather than at the point of ordering in person, making it easier for you to safely prepare for and cater to these considerations.
No-shows can be a major issue for hospitality businesses, especially when you have dedicated time and resource into a special event. 59% of respondents in our Beyond the Booking 2025 report said they were affected by no-shows in 2024.
For those affected, they reported that an average of 7% of bookings resulted in a no-show. it’s estimated that this cost the average restaurant £3,813 annually.
So, it’s especially important to try and prevent no-shows and reduce the damage.
You can protect your business against no-shows by encouraging or requiring customers to put down money ahead of time. ResDiary allows you to accept deposits in advance and pre-payments over the phone, in person or online. This discourages diners from no-showing as they have already financially committed, will give you peace of mind about no-shows.
And data shows that diners are quite happy to participate in this:
Check out our complete guide to reducing no-shows in your restaurant.
It's all well and good planning and hosting an event - but you need to properly market it to get your diners to engage with it. Sending personalised emails and alerts via restaurant event software is a great way to do this.
ResDiary's integration with Acteol levels up your email marketing: collecting data points about your customers and bringing them together to create sophisticated diner profiles.
These help you to understand your diners better than ever and create more targeted and automated campaigns, to effectively market your events to the best suited audience. Invite the diners who book with high chairs to family-friendly events.
Invite the diners who only ever book for Sunday mornings to your early-bird weekend craft fayre. Invite the diners who repeat visit every Mother's Day to your afternoon tea events.
Personalised emails and alerts can also help you get client feedback, remind customers about upcoming promotions and invite them to come back in the future.
For more information, check out our complete email marketing guide for restaurants.
With ResDiary events reporting, you’ll be able to track the progress of all your events, report on conversion rates, and understand unexpected spending.
This provides a crucial perspective on what is successful and what isn't, allowing you to drive greater returns and rewards by continuing with the high-impact events, and calling it a day on the not-so-high-impact ones.
It's important to ensure that your roster stays on track when managing events.
Using restaurant event software, you can internally assign events and event-related tasks to specific staff members, allowing you to share the workload and delegate easily to the appropriate individuals.
This takes some of the stress out of event management, knowing everything is operating efficiently and managing restaurant staff is made a little bit easier.
Not only is a software solution effective in supporting with events that you might be hosting to attract diners in, it's also handy for when you want to hire out your space for functions.
Use ResDiary to customise booking forms specifically for function enquiries, allowing customers to choose the type of event they’re planning, leave special requests and add any extra relevant information. It all elevates their experience with your brand and makes them more likely to continue with their booking enquiry.
Remember that the more you ask, the more you learn how to make your customers’ experience unforgettable.
Trust a restaurant’s opinion
Here’s a real-life example of how ResDiary's restaurant event management software made attracting and processing more regular event bookings significantly easier for one restaurant owner when they switched from OpenTable to ResDiary:
“The events enquiry feature has been brilliant for us as well. All the different brands and many restaurants have large party enquiries coming through one channel, where they all sit together and can all be dealt with in one place.
We've now got someone in our reservations team who deals solely with all of those big party enquiries, and it’s amazing for him to be able to see everything on one screen.
Plus, it captures their information and if they've agreed to receive communications, it allows us to go back to them with targeted marketing. So, we've converted quite a few bookings that way and actually got people coming back to us for multiple different occasions."
- Kathryn Knox, Head of People Development at The DRG
Events are becoming a key strategy for venues in 2025 with 42% of venue operators planning to use them to attract more diners this year, according to our Beyond the Booking: UK and Ireland Hospitality Trends Report 2025. That means that it's a good idea to start putting a plan of action in place - and restaurant event management software can play a big part in this.
There are plenty of benefits that come with utilising a software solution for your restaurant events:
Book a demo today and see for yourself how ResDiary can support your events management.