Hospitality sales continued their decline last week, sliding 23% compared to the previous week. While roughly half of sites remain closed, those that did trade saw like for likes down 15% compared to the same week in 2019.
Week on week sales had been declining since hospitality re-opened outside on the 12th of April, with a significant amount of the decline being driven by weak London performance, while sites outside of the capital remained fairly stable, until last week. Sites outside of London saw a week-on-week sales drop of over 24%. Sites inside the capital compounded two weeks of decline with a 16% drop week-on-week.
Drink sales plunged 25.3% week on week, indicating that the public’s appetite for outside drinking was washed away by the inclement weather. At the same time food sales also fell 13.9%.
Poor trading last week resulted in a significant increase in the percentage of the market who traded at 90% or less of 2019 levels. Two thirds of operators failed to trade at 90% of 2019 levels with half failing to achieve even 70% of 2019 levels.
S4labours Chief Product Officer, Richard Hartley, commented, “this level of decline shows just how difficult it is to run a hospitality business in these conditions. The weather was awful and goes a long way to explaining this data, but for another week, the 70% of operators who are significantly down on 2019 will have their eyes firmly on May the 17th, when they can protect their guest from our unpredictable weather, give their team more hours and increase their capacity to get profitable again”.
