How an AI-powered messaging campaign could boost your festive season bookings

Adopting this user-friendly technology will help ensure your hospitality business is busier than ever this December.

Are you hoping the festive season will help your hospitality business finish what's been an extremely challenging year on a high note?

You and scores of other proprietors around the country who've spent the past 12 months struggling to weather a perfect storm. Rising rents, wages, food costs and energy expenditure have made maintaining margins and preserving profitability an extraordinary achievement. 

And then there's Australia's long running cost of living crisis, which has seen millions of households searching for savings. Whether it's swapping Friday night takeaways for homemade fake-aways, trading down from fine dining to casual cafes, or eschewing entrees, desserts and expensive alcohol, consumers' price sensitivity has become heightened on all fronts. 

Dining between 4 and 5pm was up 24 per cent last year, according to the OpenTable 2026 Restaurant Dining Trends Report, with 43 per cent of survey respondents stating they'd like to see more happy hour and value promotions.

Businesses, too, have pulled in the belt, with faster, more affordable midday meals replacing long lavish lunches.

Against this backdrop, capitalising on major wining and dining events is critical and the biggest of them all – the December festive season – is fast approaching.

Preparing for a bumper month of business 

It's likely your Christmas planning – seasonal menu design, advance ordering of specialist ingredients and the sourcing of casual kitchen and wait staff to bolster your roster on busy dates – is already underway.

Launching marketing campaigns to alert party organisers and seasonal revellers to the quality and value of your hospitality experience should be high on your To Do list too. Unfortunately, in today's saturated, ultra-competitive market, positioning a venue as a must-visit destination is far from easy, particularly for proprietors whose budgets are modest.

Given users are exposed to more than 5,000 pieces of content a day, on average, capturing customers' interest via social media marketing has become supremely challenging. Traditional advertising, meanwhile, may cast the net too wide and can be an unaffordable proposition for businesses already feeling the pinch.

Positioning your venue for the party season with on-point messaging 

Fortunately, there are cost effective ways to showcase your venue and menu and that's where messaging campaigns have a vital role to play. Timely, accurate SMS, MMS, WhatsApp and RCS messages, crafted to feel like they're part of a conversation with the recipient, can help put your hospitality business top of the Christmas partying list for more businesses and individuals.

Sending them out costs significantly less than traditional or digital ads and their impact is far greater: research shows 98 per cent of messages are opened within minutes. By contrast, promotional emails, aka spam, are opened just 20 to 25 per cent of the time.

Consumers are voting with their thumbs: 89 per cent of Australians opt in for SMS, up from 66 per cent three years ago. That's a clear sign they're happy to be reached via text.

And it makes messaging the perfect vehicle for delivering festive season advertisements and promotions, particularly given the trend towards spontaneous dining – making last minute bookings or heading out for dinner or drinks on a whim – the digital era has ushered in. 

Venues that adopt messaging typically experience a four-fold increase in web site visitors, with top performing players achieving extraordinary returns on their investment – as high as 725 times, in some instances.

Cooking up a Christmas campaign that sizzles 

The good news is, creating and sending high-quality messages via this business critical channel has never been easier or quicker.

That's provided you choose to partner with a messaging vendor that's committed to helping hospitality businesses like yours maximise their marketing budgets and bring more diners and drinkers through the door.

Ideally, their messaging platform will draw on the power of AI, to make it ultra simple to get up and running in short order and sending out on-point offers to businesses and individuals as the festive season draws near.

It makes sense to choose a supplier whose solution offers competitive pricing, the ability to personalise and scale your campaigns, and a 100 per cent delivery guarantee, so you can be assured every single message you send reaches its intended recipient. 

Enjoying a more profitable festive season in 2026

December is one of the busiest months on the hospitality calendar and deploying AI powered messaging technology can help your venue capture its share of the corporate and consumer spend. If maximising sales and profits is a priority, it's must-have marketing technology that will help you close out the year on a high note.