Restaurant Holiday Gift Card Sales Disappoint

Customer experience management platform provider Paytronix released its holiday gift card report on Tuesday (Jan. 12) and found a mixed bag for restaurant sales of gift cards. Its research found that overall card sales ended the year down 31.8 percent when compared with 2019. However, holiday sales accounted for the same percentage of annual sales as previous years.

The average dollar amount loaded onto every card stayed relatively consistent in 2020, even with an almost one-third drop in total card sales, showing that guests kept their spending power. In this area, fine dining eateries performed very well, attaining a 7.7 percent rise in average spend per gift card during 2020.

However, full-service restaurants (FSRs) experienced most of the losses last year. Their share of the gift card market dropped by over 15 percent to comprise only 26.3 percent of gift card sales throughout restaurant verticals. The lion’s share of those sales was recouped by quick-service restaurants (QSRs), which comprised 66.5 percent in sales last year.

Fast-casual comprised 4.5 percent of annual gift card sales, while fine dining comprised 2.7 percent.

“Guests appear to have opted for either QSRs or fine dining over FSRs in 2020. QSRs have emerged as the big winner throughout the pandemic, so it’s no surprise to see them with strong gift card numbers. The fine dining category is interesting, because it suggests that people still crave a dining experience, either through high-quality food or in the hope that they can dine in soon,” Lee Barnes, head of Paytronix Data Insights, said in the announcement.

Paytronix data indicates that holiday sales, which occurred in November and December, comprised 45.8 percent of all restaurant gift card sales last year and roughly 48.6 percent of all gift card spend. The company said the result was in line with the past three years, when holiday sales comprised an average of 46.3 percent of all annual gift card sales.

As previously noted in this space, the dining industry was quick to adopt the digital tools needed to stay in operation as diners transitioned from in-restaurant dining to dining at home at the start of the pandemic.