Britain’s pubs, restaurants, and hotels overcame widespread challenges to end 2024 with virtually the same number of premises as 12 months earlier, the new Hospitality Market Monitor from CGA by NIQ and global consulting firm AlixPartners shows.
The study tracks Britain’s licensed hospitality sector — a wide range of venues spanning pubs, bars, restaurants, cafés, nightclubs, fast-food outlets, and hotels.
The report shows a total of 99,120 outlets operating in December 2024, compared to 99,113 in December 2023. It represents a year of solid consolidation after contraction in both 2022 and 2023, when the licensed sector shrunk by 4.5% and 2.9% respectively.
However, the year-on-year comparison disguises substantial churn, as many venues changed hands and some group-owned units switched to new trading formats. There were 4,078 closures and 4,085 openings over 2024 — a turnover equivalent to 11 venues a day.
Closures accelerated in the final quarter of 2024, the Hospitality Market Monitor reveals, in what is hospitality’s busiest time, due to mounting cost pressures and changing consumer habits.
Site numbers contracted by 0.7% between October and December — an average of just over eight net closures per day —as cost pressures mounted and some consumers tightened their spending. This last quarter contraction means 748 venues were lost in the three-month period, and if this trend were to continue, annualised it would represent a net loss of nearly 3,000 venues.
The latest findings show encouraging trends for pubs, bars and sports and social clubs. While the number of food-led venues has fallen by 0.7% year on year, total drink-led sites have risen by 0.5%.
Impressive resilience
“Given all the challenges that were thrown at hospitality in 2024, stability in site numbers shows the impressive resilience of operators,” said Karl Chessell, a director at CGA by NIQ. “However, we continue to see a rapid churn of sites as the sector adapts to consumers’ changing habits, while hundreds of net closures in the final quarter of the year emphasise that the burden of costs — made even heavier by the autumn Budget — is threatening hospitality’s fragile renewal.
“The long-term confidence of leaders, entrepreneurs and investors is solid, but January has already brought further closures of venues that clung on through Christmas. With economic uncertainty lingering, many more hospitality venues remain extremely vulnerable.”
Graeme Smith, AlixPartners’ managing director, said: “The sector has learnt how to operate in tough times over the course of the past few years, and there is a sense that this ability will be tested again this year, becoming more important than ever. The changes to the national minimum wage, national insurance, and business rates will render many marginal sites unviable, and cause businesses to look at how to right-size their operations for this new environment.
“While we expect the consumer outlook to improve and M&A to build as we move further through the year, a significant number of businesses will remain vulnerable. The turnover of sites will continue, too, we expect, as operators increasingly focus on core operations, close ancillary sites, and reassess opening pipelines. Restructurings and rescue deals will be an inevitable and necessary feature of this stage in the business cycle.
“In the face of this disruption, it is vital that businesses define the key actions they need to be taking — and where they need to be taking them — in order to mitigate the additional costs facing the industry.”
