The Quick Win for Gift Card Sales: Turn the Experiences You Already Run Into Gift Cards

Most hospitality gift card stores sell one thing: a monetary gift card. You buy a £10, £20 or £50 balance, and it works well enough, but it leaves a lot on the table. A bare balance is easy to forget, and it can happily sit in a drawer for months with no real reason to be spent. An experience gift card is a different thing altogether. It gives someone a reason to walk through your door on a specific evening and with someone specific in mind, so rather than gathering dust it gets a date in the diary.

The shift from monetary gift cards to experience gift cards is where much of the growth in hospitality gift cards is now coming from. It’s a genuine quick win, because you almost certainly run these experiences already, the only question is whether you have listed them as gift cards. Under the hood nothing really changes, you’re still selling value against a future visit, you're just packaging it in a way that's far more exciting to buy and much harder to forget.

A gift card is also one of the cheapest ways to bring new people through your doors. In a recent webinar on the gift card opportunity, Andre Johnstone of Upside London shared a telling figure: around 63% of people who receive a hospitality gift card are new to the brand, and roughly 22% of those become regulars. Someone else is effectively paying to refer a guest to you.

But they only become a regular if they visit, and this is where a monetary gift card lets you down. "£20 to spend" is an open question. "A rum masterclass for two" or "a six-course tasting menu with matching wines" is a planned occasion. It tells the guest not just that they have credit, but when and why to use it.

You don't need to invent anything here. Brewhouse & Kitchen sells rum masterclasses and beer tastings as gift cards. Six by Nico offers an added-value version of their tasting menu. Others package a champagne breakfast for two, a stay with dinner, or tickets to events they already host. Same value underneath. Very different reason to buy.

There is a quieter benefit too. An experience lets the buyer be generous without showing the price. You want someone to know they are getting a lovely meal on you, not exactly what you spent. "Dinner for two" does that. "£35" does not.

It also breaks the Black Friday to Christmas trap. There is always an occasion coming: Mother's Day, Father's Day, anniversaries, graduations, date night, a thank you. A Greetings Gift Card for each helps people find you in search and gives your marketing something to talk about in the quiet months, so the store earns across the calendar rather than for six weeks of it.

So, three moves worth making this week!

1) Get the experiences you already run into your gift store.
2) Build a handful of Greeting Gift Cards for occasions.  
3) Keep the value flexible behind the scenes, so a card is easy to redeem.

None of this is heavy lifting. It's mostly a change in how you present what you already have. But it turns a forgettable balance into a reason to visit, and a one-off gift into a guest who keeps coming back.

This article draws on insights shared by Andre Johnstone of Upside London in the "Unlocking the Gift Card Opportunity" webinar. Watch the full session here:

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