Before You Invest in Better F&B Data, Invest in the People Looking at It

The hospitality industry loves a dashboard.

Give us more data. Better data. Real-time data. Benchmark data. AI-powered data.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

For years, F&B has operated with far less commercial intelligence than rooms. While Revenue Managers can analyse demand patterns, booking windows, channel mix, pricing and pace, many F&B leaders are still working with yesterday’s revenue, covers and average check.

So yes, we absolutely need better F&B data.

But there is a problem.

Better data does not automatically create better decisions.

And a dashboard does not create a commercial mindset. This is why, at CUBE, we believe the order matters.

Commercial education first. Data second.

Not because data is less important. Because when the data arrives, people need to know what to do with it.

The danger of starting with the tool

Imagine giving an F&B team a new analytics platform.

Suddenly they can see revenue by hour. Average check. Covers. Beverage mix. Item performance. Table duration. Revenue per available seat hour.

Great.

Now what?

If the team has not developed the commercial curiosity to interrogate the numbers, the dashboard quickly becomes another reporting tool.

Revenue is down.

Average check is down.

Beverage sales are below target.

Friday lunch is underperforming.

Interesting. But none of those observations make you more money. The commercial value starts with the next question:

Why?

And then:

What can we do differently?

That is a very different conversation.

Perhaps Friday lunch does not have a revenue problem. It has a demand problem.

Perhaps the restaurant has demand, but not enough visibility.

Perhaps people are finding the restaurant, but the offer is not relevant enough to make them choose it.

Perhaps guests are booking and dining, but the team is missing opportunities to convert demand into higher value through drinks, add-ons, premium choices or another visit during the stay.

The data can point us towards the problem. It still takes commercial thinking to find the opportunity.

Data tells you what happened. It doesn’t always tell you what could have happened.

This is one of the limitations of relying too heavily on historical data.

Your POS can tell you what you sold. It cannot always tell you what you could have sold.

It knows that a guest ordered one glass of wine. It does not know whether the guest would have ordered a bottle if someone had made the right recommendation.

It knows that a table spent $150. It does not know whether they would have stayed for dessert, moved to the bar for another drink, booked brunch the next morning or returned for a special dining event.

It knows how many people came through the door. It does not know how many people never considered coming through the door in the first place.

That is why F&B revenue optimisation cannot begin and end with POS data. We need to look beyond the transaction.

At CUBE, we look at the wider commercial journey through four lenses:

Demand → Visibility → Relevance → Conversion

• Is there demand for what we are offering?
• Are we visible where that demand exists?
• Is the proposition relevant enough for someone to choose us?
• And once we have their attention – or have them sitting in our restaurant – how effectively do we convert that opportunity into revenue?

The answers will never come from one dashboard alone.

The most valuable question is rarely “What does the data say?”

The more interesting question is: “What are we going to do about it?”

This is where commercial education becomes critical.

Before introducing more sophisticated F&B data tools, we want leaders and teams to understand the commercial levers available to them.

How does demand influence performance?

How can we create demand rather than simply wait for it?

How do pricing, menu engineering, capacity and table duration interact?

What is the relationship between covers, average check and revenue per hour?

How does the server influence revenue?

Where are the revenue moments across the guest journey?

What can Marketing, Revenue, Sales and Operations do together to improve F&B performance?

Because once teams start thinking this way, something interesting happens.

They start asking better questions of the data.

Instead of: “What was our average check last month?”

They ask: “Why is average check higher on Saturday than Friday?”

Instead of: “Which dishes sell the most?”

They ask: “Which dishes contribute most to revenue and margin – and are we giving them enough visibility?”

Instead of: “How many covers did we do?”

They ask: “At what times are we turning demand away, and at what times do we have capacity we could monetise?”

Instead of: “Beverage revenue is down.”

They ask: “Is beverage spend down because of our guest mix, our offer, our pricing – or because we are simply not selling?”

Now the dashboard becomes useful. Because the people looking at it know what they are looking for.

Data should create curiosity, not dependency

There is another risk with becoming too “data-driven”. We start waiting for the data to give us the answer. But sometimes the most valuable commercial opportunities have no historical data.

You may have never offered a pool-day package to local residents.

You may have never sold a five-course anniversary dinner on the beach.

You may have never opened the restaurant at a different time.

You may have never incentivised servers around beverage conversion.

You may have never targeted a specific local audience.

So there is no historical performance to analyse. Someone has to have the commercial instinct to say:

“What if?”

Then test it.

Measure it.

Learn from it.

And optimise it.

That is how new data is created.

The strongest commercial organisations are therefore not simply data-driven. They are commercially driven and data-informed. There is a difference.

Technology is the enabler. Capability is the advantage.

We are strong believers in better F&B data.

Hotels should be able to extract more value from the enormous amount of transactional information sitting inside their POS systems. The right technology can make that data accessible, visual and actionable in ways that traditional reporting simply cannot. But buying the platform is the easy part. The competitive advantage comes from what happens next.

What do your leaders notice?

What questions do they ask?

What assumptions do they challenge?

What experiments do they run?

And how quickly can they turn an insight into action?

This is why CUBE approaches F&B Revenue Optimisation in this order:

Build the commercial mindset.

Understand the revenue levers.

Learn to ask better questions.

Then bring in richer data and better tools.

Because ultimately, the objective is not to create more dashboards. It is to create more commercially capable people. People who can look at a number and see an opportunity. People who understand that data tells us what happened – but commercial thinking helps us decide what happens next.

And when you combine the two?

That is when data starts making you money.