Sales by hour: the report that decides schedules, staffing and promotions in the hotel restaurant

At seven in the morning the hotel restaurant is full and there are two servers. At three in the afternoon there are four servers and one table. At eight at night it fills up again and the kitchen cannot keep up. The manager knows something is wrong with the schedule, but adjusts it from memory and from complaints. The sales-by-hour report exists so that it gets adjusted with data.

The hotel’s curve is not the street’s curve

A street restaurant lives on lunch and dinner, and its curve depends on the office next door and the weather. The hotel restaurant lives on the people who slept upstairs. Its curve is drawn by included breakfast, check-out time, check-in time, the return from excursions and the dinner of whoever does not want to leave the hotel. And that curve changes with the type of guest: the corporate traveler eats breakfast early and dinner late; the weekend family eats breakfast late and lunch at the pool.

The consequence is that the restaurant’s schedule cannot be copied from anywhere else. It has to come out of its own sales by hour, by revenue center and by day of the week. And since occupancy changes with the season, the schedule that worked in March may be overstaffed in June. The report is not read once: it is read every week.

What the report has to show

A useful sales-by-hour report is not a list of totals per hour. It has to let you cross demand with the staff who were on the floor and with the type of diner. These are the columns that make the difference.

• A time slot of one or two hours, depending on volume; in small hotels, two hours is enough.
• Covers and net sales per slot, with room charges included, because at breakfast and dinner that is the biggest share.
• Revenue center: restaurant, bar, pool bar and room service have different curves and different staff.
• Guest versus walk-in in every slot, to know whom you are designing the schedule for.
• Servers and cooks on the floor during that slot, to calculate sales per labor hour.
• Day of the week, because the corporate Tuesday and the family Saturday are two different restaurants.

The column almost nobody has is staff on the floor. Without it, you see demand but not the cost of serving it, and the schedule keeps being decided by intuition. With it, every slot has a number that can be compared: how much every server hour sold.

An illustrative example with numbers

The figures below are invented to show the calculation. They do not describe any real hotel. A weekday, the main restaurant of a hotel with included breakfast posted at its allocation value.

The day adds up to 283 covers and 50,300 in sales with 58 server hours. The curve has two clear strong slots, 7 to 9 and 19 to 21, and a long valley from 11 to 19 that produces less than 400 per server hour in three of its four slots. The problem is not that there is a valley: every hotel restaurant has one. The problem is that the valley has the same number of people as the strong slot.

If the schedule moves to 4 servers from 7 to 9, 2 from 9 to 11, 1 from 11 to 13, 2 from 13 to 15, 1 from 15 to 17, 2 from 17 to 19, 4 from 19 to 21 and 3 from 21 to 23, the day uses 38 server hours instead of 58, for the same sales. That is 20 hours a day that become a real rest for the team, one fewer shift to cover, or more hands in the 19 to 21 slot where the kitchen cannot keep up today. None of that is visible in the day’s total.

Dead hours: what to do with them

The first reaction to a valley is to close the restaurant from 15 to 17. In a hotel that is almost always a mistake, because the guest who arrives hungry at four after a flight will not come back at seven if they found the door closed: they will order delivery from their room. The valley is not closed: it is served with fewer people and used for what can actually be sold at that hour.

Reduce without closing

One server on the floor, a short valley menu with six or seven dishes the kitchen can produce with one person, and the pool bar (Pool bar) covering what the guest wants at that hour, which is usually a drink and something light. Sales per server hour go up even if the slot’s total sales do not change, because the cost of serving it went down.

Use the valley to prepare the strong slot

Kitchen staff who are not serving can be getting ahead on dinner production, checking inventory or doing the deep cleaning there is never time for. That does not show as sales, but it shows in the 19 to 21 slot when the kitchen is on time and the average check rises because nobody left without dessert for having waited.

Redesign the shift with the curve in hand

The classic schedule of two eight-hour shifts puts the same people on all day, drowning the strong hours while overstaffing the valley. With the curve in front of you, the redesign follows a simple logic: people come in staggered before the climb and leave staggered after the drop.

1. Mark on the curve the two slots with the highest sales per hour and the two with the lowest.
2. Calculate how many covers per hour one server can handle well in your restaurant; in the example, the 7 to 9 slot with 90 covers and 4 servers leaves 11 covers per server per hour.
3. Assign staff by slot from that number, not by full shift.
4. Stagger arrivals: two people fifteen minutes before the climb, the rest at the start of the strong slot.
5. Stagger departures the same way, and leave a single person in the valley with the short menu.
6. Review each day of the week’s curve separately and keep two or three different schedules, not one for the whole week.

Promotions that follow the curve instead of fighting it

A promotion is there to move demand toward where there is capacity, not to fill further a slot that is already full. If the valley is from 15 to 17, the promotion goes there and it targets the guest who is in the hotel at that hour: the one who arrived early, the one back from the excursion, the one working from the room.

• Afternoon coffee and dessert for guests, charged to the room from the table or the lounger, between 15 and 17.
• A drinks hour at agreement price at the pool bar from 16 to 18 for the leisure guest, announced at check-in.
• Early dinner with a short menu from 17 to 19 for families with children, who free the tables before the strong slot.
• Room service with a valley menu from 15 to 18, offered by message to the guest who just walked into the room.
• Late breakfast from 10 to 12 on weekends, when the family curve shifts two hours compared with the corporate one.

Every promotion is measured with the same sales-by-hour report two weeks later. If the slot went up and the one next to it did not go down, it worked. If the slot went up because the one next to it went down, you only moved sales and gave away margin.

Tomorrow’s occupancy already tells you tomorrow’s curve

This is the advantage a hotel restaurant has over any restaurant on the street: it knows how many people will sleep upstairs tomorrow, when they arrive and what kind they are. The front desk has the arrivals, the departures, the groups and the agreements. If the restaurant manager gets that figure every afternoon, they can adjust the next day’s curve before it happens.

A corporate group of thirty arriving on Tuesday at six will have dinner at eight. A big check-out day on Sunday will fill breakfast from 7 to 9 and empty the rest of the day. Forty percent occupancy on a low-season weekday calls for the valley schedule all day. The historical curve says how each type of guest behaves; tomorrow’s occupancy says how many of each type you will have. The seasonal operation page (Seasonal hotel) covers how to adjust the whole restaurant to those changes.

Common mistakes when reading sales by hour

• Reading sales by hour without staff on the floor: you see demand but not the cost of serving it.
• Mixing revenue centers: the pool bar climbs at four while the restaurant drops, and added together they look like a flat day.
• Averaging the whole week into a single curve: Tuesday and Saturday do not look alike and the resulting schedule works for neither.
• Using the time of payment instead of the time of the order: the check closed at ten was consumed at half past eight.
• Leaving room charges out: guest breakfast and dinner vanish from the curve and the valley looks like the strong slot.
• Closing the valley instead of reducing it: the guest who finds the door closed orders delivery from the room.

What to do this week

1. Pull sales by two-hour slot for the last four weeks, by revenue center and by day of the week, with room charges included.
2. Write next to every slot how many servers and cooks were on the floor and calculate sales per labor hour.
3. Identify the two strong slots and the two valley slots for each type of day, and design a staggered schedule for a single trial week.
4. Build a short valley menu of six or seven dishes and agree with the kitchen who produces it with one person.
5. Ask the front desk for the arrivals, departures and groups report for every following day, and decide each afternoon with that figure.
6. Choose a single promotion for the valley slot, aimed at the guest, and measure its effect with the same report in two weeks.

Inn Restaurant records every order with its time, its revenue center and its server, and separates guest from walk-in thanks to the charge tied to the folio, so sales by hour can be crossed with staff on the floor; the reports are explained at (Reports). If you want to see your own hotel’s curve drawn with your data, book a 15-minute demo at (contact).