Run Promotions: Sell the Quiet Table Before It Goes Cold

Most restaurant offers are a discount on a table you already had. Somebody was coming anyway, they see two-for-one on the specials board, and you serve the same meal for less money.

A promotion is the opposite trade. It is sold before anybody has decided to come, to fill a night that was going to be quiet, and it is paid for up front.

Who it is for

Any venue with a predictable dead patch. Tuesday lunch. The first three weeks of January. The gap between the school run and the evening service. If you can name the hours you would like to fill, a promotion is the mechanism for filling them.

How it works

1. Build the offer. A set menu, a tasting, a bottomless brunch, two courses for a price. Whatever it is, write it as a thing somebody would want rather than as a discount percentage.

2. Cap it and date it. Decide how many you will sell and which days it can be used. Both of these are what separate a promotion from a problem.

3. It goes where people are looking. Your venue page, the app, and a link you can put in a social post or an email.

4. Customers buy it up front. The money reaches your Stripe account when they buy, not when they arrive.

5. Staff redeem it in person. Applied at the counter or the till, marked used, and it cannot be spent twice.

Cap it. Really.

The most common way a promotion goes wrong is that it works.

An uncapped offer with a genuinely good price does not sell steadily. It sells in a rush, to people who screenshot it into group chats, and the kitchen finds out on the Saturday. A cap is not pessimism about demand — it is the difference between a promotion that earns you regulars and one that produces a bad service and a run of poor ratings.

Start with a number you could comfortably cook in addition to a normal night. If it sells out in a day, that is information, and you can run it again.

Choosing the days

A promotion valid every day is a price cut.

The whole value of the format is that it moves demand rather than discounting it. Tuesday to Thursday. Lunch only. Not in December. If somebody was going to come on Friday at eight anyway, you want them paying Friday-at-eight prices.

There is a second-order effect worth knowing about: people who come on a promotion on a Tuesday and enjoy it come back on a Saturday at full price. That is the actual return, and it only exists if the promotion was confined to the quiet slot in the first place.

When a free promotion is the right answer

Not every promotion should take money.

A free promotion is claimed rather than bought, and it is the right shape when what you want is a count and a list rather than cash up front. A free tasting for the first thirty people. A complimentary glass on your opening weekend. A free pastry with any coffee before eleven, for a fortnight in January.

You get the same things a paid promotion gives you — a cap that holds, days you control, and a list of everybody who claimed it — without asking somebody to pay for a first visit. For a new venue, or a new menu, that is usually the better trade, and it costs nothing to run.

The one rule worth keeping: cap a free promotion harder than a paid one. Nothing spreads faster than free, and nothing produces a worse first impression than a queue for something you have run out of.

What it costs

• 4.5% of what the customer pays
• €1.29 booking fee, paid by the customer on top of the price, not by you
• Free promotions cost nothing

Nothing monthly, nothing per promotion.

A worked example

A restaurant sells a €35 three-course early-evening menu, capped at 40, valid Tuesday to Thursday before 7pm.

That is €1,400. Mosey's share is 4.5%, so €63, leaving €1,337 before Stripe's card fee, all of it received before the first customer arrives. The €1.29 booking fee is paid by each customer on top of the €35, not taken from you.

Those 40 covers land across three weeks of early evenings that would otherwise have run at a third full, and the wine those tables buy is at normal prices.

Refunds and the 14-day right

A paid promotion is not tied to a specific date, so the statutory 14-day right of withdrawal does apply to it — unlike an event ticket, which is dated leisure and exempt.

Mosey honours it directly, but only where the facts are checkable: inside 14 days, not yet redeemed, and no waiver given on that purchase. Anything else reaches you as an ordinary refund request, and you decide.

You can ask buyers to waive it. Set your refund policy to immediate access and a tick box appears at checkout. As with vouchers, the waiver is recorded against the individual purchase rather than read from your current setting, so changing the setting later cannot retroactively remove a right from a buyer who was never offered the choice.

What it connects to

• Sell event tickets — when the offer is a specific night rather than a window
• Sell gift vouchers — money now, custom later
• Deal Hours — an automatic discount in chosen hours, rather than a thing bought in advance
• Run a loyalty programme — free on every tier, and it turns a first visit into a habit
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page