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MarketScale Hospitality 02/13: Finding the Right Rewards Formula

There’s no magic bullet for success in the hospitality industry. The challenge is finding the correct combination of the right ingredients. This is true whether you’re running a restaurant, hotel, or airline. On today’s episode of the MarketScale Hospitality Podcast, we take a look at the recipe for success in both restaurants and reward…

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MarketScale Hospitality 02/13: Finding the Right Rewards Formula

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There’s no magic bullet for success in the hospitality industry. The challenge is finding the correct combination of the right ingredients. This is true whether you’re running a restaurant, hotel, or airline. On today’s episode of the MarketScale Hospitality Podcast, we take a look at the recipe for success in both restaurants and reward programs.

A DASH OF SOCIAL ATTENTION WITH TWO TEASPOONS OF DATA

Some of the most closely guarded secrets in the world are food recipes. (Take a certain “military” man’s zeal at protecting that combination of 11 herbs and spices for over 85 years. That’s dedication.) There are, however, other types of professional recipes that are common knowledge, but they’re challenging to execute properly. That’s where David Scott Peters, the founder of TheRestaurantExpert.com, lives.

“If you don’t have passion, you’re out. If you do, you’re gonna learn some expensive lessons, but you’re ultimately there to take care of the guests and that’s going to bring you success,” Peters said. On today’s podcast, Peters discusses finding just the right balance of social and professional energy in a restaurant, how low unemployment affects the industry, and how a relatively recent social behavior complicates staffing.

WHAT IS THE SWEET SPOT FOR REWARDS PROGRAMS?

In his latest piece as part of his Office Hours series for MarketScale, Dr. Michael McCall assesses the challenges that rewards programs face as they move forward. He raises three specific questions for companies to consider when it comes to these types of programs. MarketScale Chief Digital Editor Geoff Short joins this episode of the podcast to help explore these questions in more detail.

“It’s not enough to just have a rewards system. You have to engage with the customer,” says Short. What this engagement looks like, along with the need to determine what behaviors are deserving of rewards, are two of the major questions facing companies with rewards programs.

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Restaurants are buying more customer tech even as visits stay 7% below 2019

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  • 01A useful benchmark for 2026 tech budgeting: 60% of operators plan to invest in customer-experience tech, but that category only outpaces front-of-house tech (54%) by six points, so many programs will compete for the same dollars and implementation bandwidth, according to the National Restaurant Association data reported by Restaurant Business.
  • 02The metric mismatch is becoming a planning risk: Restaurant Business says kiosks can lift sales per transaction, but operators still lack a clean way to measure whether customer-facing automation quietly suppresses visits, especially when chain occasions are already 7% below 2019.
  • 03For high-volume concepts, the highest-ROI “tech” may be workflow discipline: Bar & Restaurant reports operators leaning on forecasting, clear labor rules, and centralized reservation and add-on decisions to reduce peak-hour conflict, which can make customer tech feel like convenience rather than a substitute for hospitality.

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Outback’s 600-manager reset puts kitchen discipline back at the center

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  • 01The return of large-scale manager conferences is an operational tell: brands are re-centralizing standards and training, which makes equipment specs, service models, and maintenance playbooks easier to scale.
  • 02For chains that still buy equipment on sticker price, QSR Magazine’s push toward total cost of ownership reframes procurement as an uptime and utilities decision, not a capex line item.
  • 03QSR Magazine, citing the National Restaurant Association’s estimate that about 71% of QSR revenue comes from repeat customers, frames store design and the in-restaurant environment as part of the discussion around repeat visits.

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  • 01Food industry M&A is prioritizing the acquisition of plant capacity to boost production capabilities.
  • 02Companies are expanding their production lines and sites for faster fulfillment.
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