WHY RESTAURANTS WITH PATIOS ARE THE BEST BUSINESS MODEL IN 2022
The pandemic has really shone a spotlight on how many people love restaurants with patios. This isn’t news to the Barrel House team, though. We’ve included a patio in our buildout plans for years now. Why? Because it measurably improves your restaurant’s success.
If you include outdoor dining in your business plan, it can boost your revenue up to 30%. While we’ve heard about open-air dining more during the pandemic, restaurants with patios have always been a good investment.
At Barrel House, we know that maintaining high customer standards is important. That’s why our restaurant building plans include a patio from the start. The result is a comfortable, beautifully designed patio that boost your restaurant’s bottom line. This outdoor space increases your seating, encourages events, and meets customers’ demand for comfortable outdoor dining options.
Restaurant Patios Provide Extra Seating
Your restaurant’s revenue is limited by how many customers you can accommodate. A patio can help you serve and attract more customers, keep those customers happy, and boost your bottom line.
A patio gives you more space for more tables – meaning you can seat more customers and decrease wait times. Your restaurant’s outdoor dining space is also an advertisement for anyone who walks by. If they can see happy customers sipping a glass of wine and enjoying meals, they may stop in, too!
Patios are also a great way to increase your customers’ comfort. Dining outdoors in good weather is always a comfortable experience. But increasing your restaurant’s footprint with a patio can also increase the space betweentables, making for a more comfortable experience.
Extra seating may be limited to warmer months, but research shows that a seasonal restaurant patio absolutely returns on the investment! You can even extend your outdoor patio’s season with heaters, fire pits, and more for early-spring and late-fall dining.
A Restaurant With a Patio is the Perfect Event Space
As an event space, restaurants with patios are second to none. Having both indoor and outdoor dining is the perfect way to make your restaurant franchise stand out from other venues.
When choosing a restaurant to host their events, customers love the flexibility of a patio. As the restaurant owner, you can choose to rent out the restaurant patio as a space of its own. This allows customers to host events without forcing you to close to the public.
Or, if you choose to rent out the restaurant and patio together, you offer customers a more flexible (and more valuable!) venue for their events. Either way, both the franchise owner and customer win with a patio.
But there’s no need to rely on customers to plan and host events. When you open your own restaurant, a patio gives you the flexibility to plan events of your own. Whether you’re attracting new customers or bringing back the same crowd, these events are a great way to fill seats.
A restaurant with outdoor seating is the perfect area for live music. Listening to a local band on the brightly colored patio on a warm, summer evening sounds like the perfect date night! Customers who may not want to hear a loud, live band will still be comfortable in the dining room.
A regular event, like trivia or bingo, can help turn customers into regulars. When you host a game night every week or even every month, your customer can plan to return again and again. Your restaurant’s patio is the perfect place to host game nights. Customers who aren’t playing can be seated indoors, away from the noise and bustle.
Customers Prefer Restaurants with Patios
While the extra seating and event space a patio provides are nice, put simply, customers love patios. Open-air dining was a necessity during the pandemic. But even now, it’s hard to beat happy hour in the sunshine. In one recent survey, 84% of adults hoped wanted to see more outdoor dining stick around – even after the pandemic ends.
Outdoor dining allows you to take advantage of the best weather your location has to offer. Some restaurant owners worry that a patio space is only useful in good weather. But studies show that customers are more likely to go out to eat when the weather is pleasant, anyway.
Your customers may not show up at all if it’s raining. But they’re sure to enjoy a sunny day even more if they spend it on your restaurant’s patio.
The revenue increases in restaurants with patios speak to customers’ love of open-air dining. 43% of millennials are more likely to spend more on alcohol when seated outdoors. Since every Barrel House franchise includes a full bar, you’ll be well-suited to provide these profitable extra drinks! Outdoor dining is also a strong preference for customers who are traveling, making it a favorite of tourists and regulars alike.
WHY YOUR NEW RESTAURANT SHOULD HAVE A PATIO
The combination of extra seating, event space, and customer preference makes a patio an essential part of your restaurant business plan. This outdoor seating space can give any restaurant a serious competitive edge. Eating and drinking outdoors has always been a customer favorite. But the pandemic has proven that an outdoor dining space makes your business more flexible and successful in challenging times.
When opening a new Barrel House franchise, your expertly designed layout will include a patio space from the start. The patio is just one of the strategies we’ve discovered in our years running successful restaurants. We’re happy to pass along all this wisdom as part of your Barrel House franchise training!
If you’d like to learn more about opening your own Barrel House, reach out today!