Thirteen Months Behind Inflation

The NIQ RSM Hospitality Business Tracker published May's figures last month. Like-for-like sales across Britain's leading hospitality groups grew 0.4% on the same month last year. Second month of positive growth in all of 2026.

The small print is the story. Sales growth has come in below the UK rate of inflation for thirteen consecutive months. Thirteen months of numbers that look like progress while the gap between costs and revenue kept widening. The sector grew. It grew more slowly than everything it was paying for.

What positive sales growth actually means

A restaurant that raises its mains by five percent and serves the same number of people as last year shows positive like-for-like sales growth. The dining room is no fuller. The covers have not recovered. The kitchen sends out the same number of plates. The tracker shows growth.

That is what is happening. The Morning Advertiser ran the headline in June: hospitality growth is being driven by higher prices, not higher volume. The rooms are repriced into a rising cost base. The people coming through the door have not materially increased. The figure is real. The improvement it suggests is not.

Why covers matter more than revenue

A hospitality business runs on fixed costs. The rent is the rent whether the room is full or half-empty. The rota was set before anyone knew how the booking sheet would look. The kitchen preps to a service level that does not adjust in real time to how many tables come through.

What covers the fixed cost structure is covers. Not revenue per cover. Covers.

When prices rise and volume stays flat, the maths gets interesting in the wrong direction. If the fixed costs climbed by eight percent and the menu went up by five, the extra revenue does not close that gap. The same number of people, spending slightly more, in a room that costs more to run than it did last year, is not a recovery. It is a slower version of the same problem.

The seat that repricing cannot reach

There is exactly one thing a menu price increase cannot do. It cannot put someone in the chair that was not booked.

The empty table on a Tuesday evening costs the same to prepare for whether the mains are fifteen pounds or twenty. The food was prepped. The team is on. The lights are on. The cover that did not come earns nothing at either price point. Repricing is a response to inflation. It has nothing to say about the empty seat.

We run kitchens across Sussex. The quiet midweek service is not a pricing problem. You can put whatever you like on the menu; if the table stays cold, the cost structure still runs, and the chair still earns nothing.

Around 4pm, when the shape of the evening becomes clear, Halfseat asks venues to release the tables they expect to lose. Food at half price. Drinks at full price. A real cut of the booking fee going to the venue, and every pound at the bar earning at the margin it always earned.

That is not a response to inflation. It is a response to volume. The cover that fills the dead seat is not a statistical abstraction. It is someone sitting down, ordering a bottle, and paying for a service the kitchen had already staffed for.

The number worth watching

Thirteen months of sales growth below inflation is a summary of a sector running hard to stand still. Repricing is what operators do when they have no choice. It buys time. It does not solve the seat count.

The month the tracker records a genuine increase in volume, not just a revenue figure adjusted for inflation, is the month the trend has actually turned. Until then, the P&L improvement that matters is the one that happens cover by cover, on the nights that would otherwise have stayed quiet.

The empty chair earns the same at every price point. Zero.