New Year's Eve marketing for pubs and restaurants: a plan for 2026

New Year's Eve marketing for a pub or restaurant starts in October. Decide between tickets, walk-ins or a mix, publish a priced package with clear refund terms, and check your licensing hours before you sell anything. Then post on a schedule that runs from the announcement to the last few spaces on the day, and plan New Year's Day too, which is a Friday bank holiday in 2027.

#Tickets, packages or walk-ins?

Pick the model first. Your prices, your staffing and every post you write depend on it.

Tickets suit restaurants and any venue where capacity is tight or food is the main event. You know your numbers, you've got the money in early, and you can staff to the head. Walk-ins suit community pubs where the regulars expect to turn up at nine and stay till one, and where a ticket would feel like a door being shut on them.

You can also land somewhere in between. Ticketed dinner sittings, then the bar opens to everyone after 10pm. Or a small entry ticket that includes a drink on arrival, with a few walk-in spaces kept back for regulars. If you've ever had a half-empty room at nine o'clock and a queue round the corner at half eleven, the mix is worth trying.

#What should a New Year's Eve package include?

A good package tells people exactly what their money buys and what time everything happens.

For a restaurant, I'd usually pick two sittings over one long one. As an illustration, a place called Larkspur Kitchen might run an early sitting at 6pm (four courses, £55, table back by 8.30pm) and a late sitting at 8.45pm (six courses, a glass of fizz at midnight, £85). The early sitting sells to families and people heading on elsewhere. The late one is the event.

For a pub, think in times: doors, food, music, midnight, last orders. A fictional pub called The Weaver's Rest might sell £15 tickets including a drink on arrival, a DJ from 9pm, hot food at 11pm, a countdown and fizz at midnight, and last orders at 1am. Put every one of those times in the post, because "what time does it finish?" is the question you'll otherwise answer forty times in the comments.

Whatever you sell, show the full price. If there's a booking fee nobody can avoid, the CMA's guidance on price information says the total price should normally include it, and hiding unavoidable fees until later in the booking (drip pricing) is illegal. A dietary note helps too: say what you can do for vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free guests, and ask about allergies when they book.

#Deposits, refunds and booking fees

Write your refund and transfer terms before you open bookings, put them on the booking page, and repeat them in the confirmation email.

The 14-day right to cancel that covers many online and phone purchases doesn't reach most New Year's Eve bookings. Under regulation 28(1)(h) of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, the cancellation part of those rules doesn't apply to catering or leisure services where the contract is for a specific date. So your own terms decide what happens when someone pulls out.

Those terms still have to be fair. The Competition and Markets Authority's unfair contract terms guidance (paragraph 6.62) says a genuine deposit can be kept in full if it secures the booking and you've made clear, at the earliest opportunity, exactly when it won't be refunded, but that it won't normally be more than a small percentage of the price. Larger prepayments are more likely to be unfair unless what you keep reflects your real costs. And if the night can't go ahead at all for reasons nobody controls, the same guidance (paragraph 6.77) says customers should normally get a swift, full refund, including money described as non-refundable.

My preference is to let people transfer a ticket or a booking to someone else free of charge up to the day. It costs you very little, and I'd expect it to head off most refund requests while keeping the room full.

This is general information, not legal advice.

#Check your licensing hours before you sell a single ticket

Look at the opening hours on your premises licence before you announce anything. If the hours you want aren't there, you'll need a Temporary Event Notice (TEN) in England and Wales, and the deadline comes round faster than you'd think.

The Home Office's section 182 guidance expects premises to anticipate regular special occasions in their operating schedules (paragraph 8.78), so some licences already include extra hours for particular dates. If yours doesn't cover New Year's Eve, paragraph 7.20 confirms a TEN can be given for premises that already have a licence, to cover licensable activities the licence doesn't permit.

The limits, from the gov.uk Temporary Events Notice page:

• Fewer than 500 people at any one time, staff included
• Up to 168 hours per event
• Up to 15 TENs per premises a year, with no more than 21 days in total
• £21, given to your local council
• At least 10 clear working days' notice for a standard TEN

Two details matter more than usual at Christmas. An event that starts before midnight and runs into the next day counts as two days towards the 21-day limit (paragraph 7.21 of the guidance). And working days exclude weekends, Christmas Day and bank holidays (paragraph 7.4). With Christmas on a Friday and the Boxing Day bank holiday on Monday 28 December, my count puts the last day for the council to receive a standard TEN for an event starting on Thursday 31 December 2026 at Monday 14 December. Late TENs exist, but if the police or environmental health object to one, the event doesn't go ahead (paragraph 7.14). I'd send yours in November and stop worrying about it.

Scotland uses occasional licences instead of TENs, and Northern Ireland has its own licensing system, as gov.uk's alcohol licensing page notes, so check with your local licensing authority there. This is general information, not legal advice.

#When should you post about New Year's Eve?

Announce in October, push through November and early December, and post exact remaining spaces from Christmas onwards. Here's the shape I'd follow for 2026:

• Mid to late October: announce the night, the times and the price, with early-bird tickets if you're doing them
• November: menu reveal, DJ or band announcement, photos from last year if you've got them
• Early December: an email to your list with a direct booking link (see the email marketing guide for how often to send)
• Mid December: "late sitting nearly full" posts, but only when it's true, with the number of tables left
• 27 to 30 December: last tickets, plus walk-in details (what time the door policy starts, whether there's a charge)
• 31 December morning: final call, times, dress code if there is one, and how busy you expect to be
• 1 January: thank-you post with a photo from the night, then your New Year's Day offer

Christmas parties and New Year's Eve end up competing for the same feed space in December, so plan them together. The Christmas party bookings guide covers that side. Put the night on your Facebook page as well as Instagram, with the full timings in both (the Facebook marketing guide for pubs has more on events).

If you'd rather plan all of these at once, you can describe the night to Venuesmith in a sentence and it'll build the run of posts for you to edit and approve before anything publishes.

#Staffing the night

Sort the rota before you sell the tickets. Staff want to know early whether they're working New Year's Eve, and you can't sell 200 tickets if you've only got enough people to serve 120.

Decide how you'll choose who works (volunteers first, then a fair rotation) and tell the team by early November. Plan how everyone gets home, because taxis after 1am on New Year's Day can be hard to come by. Brief the team on the timings, the capacity and the door policy the week before, and give one person the job of running the countdown so it happens on time.

If you add a service charge on New Year's Eve, the statutory code of practice on tips says service charges, including ones added automatically, must be passed to workers without deductions, and that you need a written tipping policy.

#What about New Year's Day?

New Year's Day 2027 falls on Friday 1 January, and it's a bank holiday across the UK, according to gov.uk. In Scotland, 2 January is a Saturday, so the substitute bank holiday is Monday 4 January. That gives you a long weekend to sell straight after the big night.

I'd keep New Year's Day gentle. A late breakfast or brunch from about 11am, a roast, a walk followed by a pint by the fire, somewhere that welcomes dogs. Post it on the afternoon of 31 December and again on the morning of 1 January with your opening times, because people won't assume you're open on a bank holiday.

Then January starts, and it's a different job. The guide to Dry January for pubs covers keeping the place busy through January, and the 2027 hospitality marketing calendar lists the dates worth planning for after that.