June 2025 landed right in that awkward stretch where the sun’s out, the diaries look busy, and the bank balance still remembers April’s wage and NI uplift. Terraces and tourist footfall can hide a lot, until you try to staff it properly and realise the “good week” still isn’t a profitable one. This month’s news didn’t read like a recovery story, it read like operators trying to redesign the machine while it’s running.
One third of businesses at a loss, and everyone’s adjusting the rota
UKHospitality did the sector a favour by putting a hard number on what many operators have been muttering for months: one third of hospitality businesses are operating at a loss. The knock-on is exactly what you’d expect, job cuts and reduced hours, which is the polite way of saying “we’re running the floor thinner and praying it doesn’t show up in guest feedback”.
The more provocative bit is how openly some operators are now talking about the price spiral. WH Pubs owner Brian Whiting called it a “toxic” loop and said a “£10 pint is inevitable” if costs keep stacking up. That’s not theatre, it’s a warning about demand. Once guests start mentally benchmarking you against the supermarket and the sofa, you’re no longer competing pub-to-pub, you’re competing against staying in.
Regulatory and tax chatter hasn’t helped confidence either. JW Lees managing director William Lees-Jones warned of “devastating consequences” if there’s no government U-turn on property business relief changes. Whether you’re a family brewer or a single-site restaurant, that’s the same message, fixed costs are getting less forgiving, so customer satisfaction has to do more heavy lifting.
Debt, franchises, and the new growth maths
A lot of June’s “growth” headlines were really capital structure stories. Punch Pubs & Co completing a £640m debt refinancing is a big deal, not because it’s flashy, but because it buys time. Extending bond financing out to December 2030 and increasing the bond size from £600m to £640m is the kind of move that signals, “we’re planning in five-year blocks, not quarter-to-quarter panic”.
Alongside that, franchising keeps creeping into places you wouldn’t have expected ten years ago. JD Wetherspoon actively courting hotel operators for franchise partnerships, via Christie & Co, is fascinating. The first site is expected to open this year, and the logic is pretty clear: hotels have captive footfall and underused space, and Wetherspoon has a proven playbook for volume. For hotel operators, it’s also a statement, if you can’t make your own bar and restaurant consistently busy across seven days, buy in a demand engine.
Meanwhile, capital is sniffing around again
Christie & Co also flagged increased interest from US and Far East equity firms, with more M&A expected as interest rates fall. Operators don’t need to be deal junkies to care about that. More buyers in the market changes rent conversations, premium expectations, and the pace at which competitors can expand.
Digital ordering is now the quiet redundancy programme
June made it hard to ignore what’s really driving “digital transformation” in hospitality. Pizza Hut Restaurants UK rolling out digital ordering systems, with up to 120 role cuts on the table, is the blunt version. Less labour at the point of sale, fewer steps per order, more throughput. The business case is obvious when labour costs jump, but the customer experience risk is also obvious if the system is clunky, the handoff is chaotic, or no one is watching the dining room.
It’s not just one brand, either. Subway hit 400 digital kiosks installed across Europe. Asda is investing £10m to modernise more than 180 in-store cafés, including digital ordering screens. German Doner Kebab is accelerating robotic kitchen rollouts, including robotic meat shavers and “smart kitchens”, specifically to ease labour costs.
The trade-off operators actually face
Cutting queue time and order errors can lift customer satisfaction, but only if you don’t also cut the human bits guests still care about, cleanliness, reassurance, pace, and fixing problems quickly. Every kiosk install shifts the job from “take the order” to “host the room and rescue the service”. Too many venues save the wage line, then lose it back in online reviews about cold food, no table touch, and nobody owning the issue.
Experiential leisure keeps stealing the evening, and it’s not slowing down
If food-led venues felt a bit edgy in June, competitive socialising looked like it had its foot on the accelerator. Powerleague, Europe’s largest five-a-side football provider, being acquired by Broadsword Investment Management is a serious signal that investors still like “bookable fun” with add-on spend. It’s predictable demand, it’s group occasions, and it’s weather-resistant in a way a lot of pubs and casual dining aren’t.
Hollywood Bowl added a new 22-lane venue in Uxbridge, complete with amusements and an American-style bar and diner. More interesting than the lanes is the strategy chat: the CEO talked up co-locating with competitive socialising. That’s operators acknowledging what landlords already know, leisure clusters create footfall that single units struggle to generate on their own.
London kept pushing the same direction. The Luna Entertainment Group launched “Squid Game: The Experience” at Immerse LDN, and Tokyo Industries acquired the 430-seat Emerald Theatre as part of a pivot towards immersive entertainment aimed at Gen Z. Up in the North East, Immersive Everywhere is bringing a Peppa Pig interactive experience to the Metrocentre in Gateshead, which tells you how broad the audience for “experiences” has become.
For operators, the lesson is uncomfortable but practical: the guest isn’t always choosing between you and the place next door. They’re choosing between you and an activity that feels like value before they’ve even seen the menu.
The common thread through June? Operators are trying to buy certainty in different ways. Some are refinancing and franchising to keep growth alive. Some are swapping labour for kiosks and robotics to protect margin. And some are building their offer around booked occasions because walk-in, weather-driven footfall just isn’t reliable enough to bet the P&L on.
Where measurement matters
When you change the model, franchising into hotels, rolling out kiosks, or bolting a bar onto an entertainment venue, you need fast, site-level feedback on what’s breaking. That’s where structured programmes earn their keep: Mystery Customer Visits show whether the new service flow is actually working at 7pm on a Saturday, not just in the training deck. Pair that with Online Reviews Monitoring and you can see, in plain English, whether guests are talking about speed and ease, or about confusion and nobody being available to help.
July and August will tell us which of these bets holds up when school holidays hit, staffing gets even tighter, and every venue is chasing the same sunny day spend. If you’d like a sample report or a quick chat about what’s possible, get in touch.