You're probably already well on your way in creating your Christmas rotas, digging out last year's models and trying to piece together which days hit capacity and which were quieter. It's the same every year: you know the rush is coming, but planning for it still feels like guesswork.
Here's why it matters more this year: UK hospitality venues face over 132,000 vacancies (48% higher than pre-pandemic levels), while employing a full-time team member now costs at least £2,500 more annually than it did last year. Get staffing wrong and you're either burning cash on unproductive hours or losing revenue through poor service.
The real damage happens after Christmas ends. Customers who endure slow service or long waits don't just leave bad reviews. They don't come back, and worse, they tell their friends not to bother. One understaffed shift in December can cost you repeat business for months.
This post shows you how to forecast demand accurately, control wage costs through better visibility, and protect both your Christmas profit and your future bookings.
UK hotel payroll costs per available room jumped from £44.59 to £47.57 in December 2024, with London seeing an even steeper climb from £59.07 to £63.52. Guest demand was strong, but margins couldn't keep up with labour costs rising faster than revenue.
The pattern held across the sector. Restaurants, pubs and bars recorded 3.2% year-on-year sales growth in December, but every penny of that growth got swallowed by higher payroll and energy bills. With employment costs rising again in 2025, the squeeze isn't easing.
Add to that the 89,000 workers the sector lost since last October, and the picture becomes clear: you can't hire your way through peak season. You need to plan better with the team you've got.
Schedule too many staff and December profit disappears, with unproductive hours adding up fast when you overestimate demand or fail to account for quieter periods between peak days.
It gets worse: irregular overtime must legally be reflected in four weeks of holiday pay, which means hasty rota decisions in December become expensive liabilities in January.
Schedule too few staff and you lose revenue as tables stay empty because service is too slow, guests leave poor reviews, and staff burn out and quit.
But understaffing during Christmas doesn't just cost this year's profit. It damages future sales too. Customers who experience poor service during their Christmas meal don't give you another chance in January; instead, they book elsewhere next year and tell their friends and family.
One understaffed shift in December can cost you repeat business for months.
Here's what frustrates operators most: your systems are disconnected. Bookings live in one platform, POS data in another, rotas somewhere else entirely. None of them talk to each other.
The irony? For Christmas, you actually have more data than you've ever had. Customers book weeks ahead, so you know exactly when they're coming and what they've ordered. You have advance notice that most retailers would kill for.
But all that valuable booking data stays locked in your reservations system while you're building rotas in a completely separate tool. You end up planning labour without utilising all the data you have available. The data exists, you just can't use it.
That changes when your booking system, POS, and workforce tools actually connect. Suddenly you can plan by the hour, not by vague weekly averages that hide the peaks and troughs you need to staff for.
Real labour forecasting starts with data integration. When you can correlate historical sales with bookings, events and even weather trends, you stop guessing and start anticipating. You know which roles you need and when you need them.
The results speak for themselves. Venues using AI-led labour planning have achieved up to 10% labour cost savings and cut overtime by 3% per week. When you connect scheduling and payroll directly to POS, you get wage cost versus sales analytics that show you exactly where you stand throughout the shift.
At Ometis, we integrate 30+ hospitality data sources into unified dashboards. Your booking system, POS, HR platform and payroll all feed into one view, so you stop jumping between systems trying to piece together what's actually happening.
You get historical sales patterns by hour, day and week, alongside seasonal demand trends and festive booking data. Layer in local events and weather forecasts that affect footfall, plus staff availability, skills and shift preferences.
The key difference from generic industry reports? You're not looking at what everyone else is doing. You're seeing your venue's actual patterns.
You schedule by skill and shift requirements, not just headcount. You control overtime before it happens by spotting demand gaps early. And instead of relying on weekly averages that smooth over the peaks and troughs, you drill down by hour to see exactly when you'll be busy.
With our hospitality analytics solutions, you’re planning shifts from reactive to preventive. You identify demand spikes days before they hit, rather than scrambling to respond once the rush has already started.
Predictive analytics takes your labour forecasting from basic to surgical. Instead of rough estimates, you get precise hourly demand forecasts based on contextual patterns that actually matter. Real-time forecasting tools reduce labour costs by aligning staff hours to actual guest needs, while also improving morale because staff get fair, stable rotas instead of chaos.
Predictive models analyse your booking curves against historical Christmas trading patterns and local event calendars. This means you see which days and which specific hours will spike before you even publish rotas.
Why does this matter? Because Christmas demand isn't consistent. Office parties cluster mid-week, family bookings peak on weekends, and afternoon trade stays quiet until evening service kicks in. Predictive analytics shows you exactly when and where to deploy your team, so you're not guessing based on last year's fading memories.
Our hospitality solutions could allow you to forecast labour demand hour by hour using your historical patterns, seasonal trends and actual booking data. You plan staffing based on what will actually happen, not guesswork.
Industry averages don't account for venue size, layout or location, which makes them useless for planning. A 50-cover restaurant in Manchester shouldn't compare itself to a 200-cover site in central London, just as a 100-room hotel shouldn't benchmark against a 20-room boutique property. Geographical regions matter too, because what works in a tourist hotspot doesn't translate to a suburban high street.
Compare performance across your own venues to identify what's working and what isn't. See which sites, time periods and approaches drive the best results, so you can replicate success rather than guessing what works.
Modern hospitality systems give you dashboards that compare sales and labour costs. This means you can make informed decisions based on multiple daily updates, whether that's adjusting tomorrow's deployment or planning next week's rotas more accurately.
End-to-end visibility means your operational data flows across POS, bookings, HR and payroll for faster decision-making. You see wage-to-sales ratios update multiple times per day, not when you check the system the next morning after the damage is done.
Mid-sized hotels using this approach have cut labour-related expenses significantly and boosted guest satisfaction by planning more accurately based on integrated data.
Our Tahola-AI dashboards make labour analysis visual and actionable. You get hour-level visibility and total control over wage costs during Christmas peaks, which means you can course-correct before small problems become expensive ones.
Integrated data gives you full context, not just surface-level numbers. You don't just see "cocktail sold", you see when it was sold, how long it took, by whom, and during what trading conditions. That context matters when you're making deployment decisions for upcoming shifts.
This allows you to respond intelligently during peak trading periods, making faster and smarter decisions as you plan and adjust rotas.
In 2025, we acquired Tahola, hospitality analytics specialists. Together, we now offer both ready-to-go and bespoke data solutions built around what operators actually need: faster insights, less admin, and the ability to spot problems before they cost you money.
Tahola-AI is a fully managed reporting solution that connects your existing hospitality systems (Zonal, Fourth, Collins, and many more) into one reporting platform. No project work, swift implementation and no high capex investment. You get pre-built dashboards tracking labour cost percentage, covers, booking conversion and site performance, with automated reports showing the metrics hospitality operators actually use.
Operators choose Tahola-AI because it cuts hours of manual reporting every week, gives GMs and regional managers mobile access to the right figures daily, and costs a fixed monthly fee. It's hospitality reporting that works how you work.
“Tahola-AI saves our Operations and Finance teams hours each week and helps us spot opportunities we were missing before, all for a fixed monthly fee.”
Andrew Brook, Tortilla
For operators with specific requirements, we build bespoke solutions using vendors including Qlik, Snowflake, Cognos, Microsoft, Jedox, and others. This includes centralised data warehouses that pull together your EPOS, bookings, labour and finance data, cloud migrations that move legacy reporting into scalable infrastructure, and automated multi-source reporting that replaces manual spreadsheets with live dashboards.
Using technologies like Qlik, we can build predictive labour forecasting capabilities based on your historical patterns, seasonal trends and real booking data. You plan by actual demand, not estimates.
We also build role-specific dashboards for finance, operations and leadership teams, plus "what if" analysis tools to model scenarios around pricing, staffing or site performance. Everything's built with a commercial focus: insights that drive decisions, not just more data to look at.
We connect the 30+ hospitality data sources you already use such as Zonal, Fourth, SevenRooms, Collins, Google Analytics, and more. Your booking data, POS, labour costs and operations all feed into one place, giving you true peer benchmarking against venues with similar size, layout and location. Not meaningless industry averages.
We work with operators including Brewdog, The Alchemist, PizzaExpress, Burger King, Butlin's, Albert's Schloss, GDK, Café Rouge, Pho and Peach Pubs. See our case studies here.
Our consultative approach means we don't just deliver technical implementation. We help you identify the most viable, ROI-focused action plan and unbiasedly recommend the right vendors and solutions for your operation.
Christmas labour planning starts now. You need rotas ready by early December to accommodate advance bookings, which means starting your planning in late October or early November. Don't wait until mid-December to discover your systems can't show you what you need.
Book a discovery call and we'll show you how to turn your Christmas booking data into accurate labour forecasts and real-time cost control, whether through Tahola-AI or a custom solution built for your specific needs.
Or take our hospitality data maturity quiz to see where your current systems stand and get specific recommendations for quick wins before peak season hits.