Pricing Optimisation: Fixing the Execution Gap

Guests on the panel:

• Toby Herbert, Head of IT at Hall & Woodhouse
• Sara McKennedy, Managing Director at Coco di Mama
• Mark Bentley, Business Development Director at HDI

Panel overview:

Hospitality is losing revenue not because pricing strategies are wrong, but because execution is slow and manual. The following overview is from a panel session that explores how operators can unlock immediate profit by automating proven tactics like event menus and granular price bands. 

We look at where execution breaks down, why chasing airline-style dynamic pricing is a distraction and how modern tools use triggers and testing to turn missed revenue into measurable gains.

The key focus areas:

Context & Cross-Sector Lessons

Why hospitality has lagged behind other sectors in pricing agility.

The Opportunity for Hospitality

How to align operator propositions with the guest’s willingness to pay.

Building Confidence

How to move away from “boardroom guesswork”, toward a test-and-learn culture.

Looking Ahead to 2026

Practical advice on starting the journey toward personalisation.

Part 1: Context & Cross-Sector Lessons

• For Toby: “Looking back at your time in luxury hotels, what were the fundamental differences in how that sector approached pricing compared to what you see in the pub industry today?” 

• For Mark: “From your perspective at HDI, what are the most common barriers preventing hospitality operators from managing their prices as actively as a retailer or a supermarket would?” 

Highlights from the responses:

Toby:

• When I came into hospitality I was shocked at the difference with luxury hotels for examples where I worked for a number of years
• What was table stakes in that sector doesn’t yet exist in restaurants and pubs
• I realised before we did anything else we needed to solve the pressing problem we had which was our inability to quickly deploy our menus and pricing 

Mark:

• Similarly I come from product retail background across a number of different sectors and certainly managing and understanding the relationship between pricing and consumer was 2nd nature to everything we did
• The biggest challenge for hospitality is making sure they have the data available to make good pricing decisions. Without the right the data, it’s very difficult to have a proactive pricing strategy in place

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Part 2: The Opportunity for Hospitality

• For Sara: “With a brand like Coco di Mama existing in bricks-and-mortar, delivery, and retail, how do you think about maintaining a fair ‘value exchange’ for the guest across so many different missions?” 

• For Toby: “As you look at a diverse estate like Hall & Woodhouse, what is the strategic value in being able to manage pricing at a more granular, local level?”

• For Mark: “Mark, what trends are you seeing in terms of how guests are responding to price changes in the current economic climate?” 

Highlights from the responses:

Sara:

• Coco is such a diverse brand, working across restaurants, delivery channels including national network of dark kitchens, fresh retail products across 100’s of supermarkets and office catering. All these channels consume the Coco product in very different ways, whether that be product or price.

There is a big opportunity here to unlock a lot of value through a far better understanding of how price impacts revenue across each channel.

Toby:

• If hospitality can remove the limitations and restrictions around menu and pricing agility, the opportunity is huge. Especially across diverse estates and diverse product ranges, we want to be able to better understand the impact of price across all these areas.

Mark:

• At HDI we’re seeing a real operator push to better understand how brands price versus their competitors. Equally what we’re seeing is a lack of expertise in how to use competitor pricing and other variables to model pricing strategies. 

HDI and platforms like Openr are really helping the market develop this expertise which is new to hospitality.

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Part 3: Building Confidence 

• For Sara: “When experimenting with new pricing or menu strategies, especially on delivery channels, how do you measure success and decide whether to roll a change out further?” 

• For Toby: “How does the ability to quickly deploy and—if necessary—undo a price change affect the way your team thinks about trying new commercial strategies?” 

Highlights from the responses:

Sara:

• We’ve recently started a testing phase across a limited number of channels to better understand how pricing will impact different day parts for example. 

We’re using this process to learn more about how to structure a testing phase and start to document these tests and their outcomes for future use.

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Part 4: Looking Ahead to 2026

• For Mark: “For an operator who is ready to move away from static, manual pricing, what is the most logical place for them to start their journey?” 

• For Sara & Toby: “As we head toward 2026, what does a truly ‘modern’ pricing and menu strategy look like for your respective brands?”

Highlights from the responses:

Sara: (really like this thought)

• Sees a time where pricing strategy becomes more important than promotion for the Coco brand, understanding how pricing behaves across channels and different customer segments could be game changing.

Toby:

• It will be a year of two halves; first half focusing on making sure the pricing and menu infrastructure is in place to add further sophistication in the 2nd half the year. In the second half we will focus on testing different types of pricing strategies and begin to fine tune our approach. Of course working with the team at Openr.

Mark:

• I really feel like this is the year when pricing strategy starts to become a must have in the sector.

If you’d like to find out more about how Openr can transform your pricing strategy, contact Nick on nick.liddle@weareopenr.com