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Liquor retailer Endeavour Group says Australians are rushing to book in a pub lunch for Christmas as the company’s buoyant hotels business offsets the predicted slowdown in retail sales.
Boss Steve Donohue said Endeavour’s hotels segment had benefitted from bigger groups of diners making bookings in the first weeks of the new financial year, while Christmas reservations were well up on last year.
Endeavour Group CEO Steve Donohue said that despite cost of living pressures, customers are actually showing up in larger groups and ordering more food than they had been previously.. Credit:Eamon Gallagher
“We are seeing larger groups coming together - a 10 per cent increase over the size of the booking,” he said.
“We expect to serve around 44,000 Christmas covers - so Christmas lunches, Christmas dinners - and at the moment our forward bookings are double what they were at the same time a year ago. We have demand for about a third of the seating capacity that we’ll have for Christmas already.” Those figures put the business in a strong position into the end of the calendar year, he said.
Endeavour, which operates the Dan Murphy’s and BWS chains, generated just over $3 billion in sales for the first quarter of the 2023 financial year, with sales from its hotels up 90.8 per cent to $538 million compared to the COVID-hit first quarter of 2022 as customers spend up on food and accommodation.
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Asked about cost of living pressures, Donohue acknowledged that families were looking for better value, and the affordability of the pub experience could be a factor in increased interest in hotels.
“A trade down out of fine dining, well, that is potentially a factor at play out there.”
As expected, sales across the company’s retail drinks business have slowed, however, with sales down 6.2 per cent compared with the same time last year as the incredible demand seen throughout COVID lockdowns continues to wane.