Ascot Racecourse
Behind the scenes at UK's most prestigious racing event
Royal Ascot
Royal Ascot is Britain’s most prestigious racing event with upwards of 250,000 people visiting the event every year. After two years of disruption from the Covid pandemic, Royal Ascot returned in 2022 with the largest offering of food and beverage units the event had ever seen.
HGEM's solutions were put in place for the event to ensure visitor expectations were met and exceeded.
Challenges
Before utilising HGEM's services, Ascot faced the following issues:
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Lack of visibility
Into how visitors perceive the event
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Measuring performance
No viable method to measure the performance of individual food and drink units
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Delayed feedback
Feedback about poor performance would come in too late and couldn't be used to fix things whilst the event was still ongoing
Solutions
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Mystery Guest Audits
Were implemented to measure the performance of both Fine Dining establishments and Food & Beverage units (i.e. food and drink stalls).
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Fine Dining Audits
Were scheduled in the beginning of the week so that learnings could be applied to improve performance during the rest of the week. The management team had access to two different reports per visit. Feedback was provided same day, to identify any potential issues as fast as possible. A thorough report, including detailed comments was provided within 24 hours of the visit.
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Guest Feedback
We provided real-time event feedback through 1251 face-to-face interviews, on a short Guest Feedback Site for a large volume of rapid responses.
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Social Reviews
Review data from multiple sources, such as, Google and TripAdvisor, was pulled into one dashboard, so all recent (up to 6 months) and new reviews could be viewed and responded to from one central location. We also provided access to competitor data, which was also pulled into the dashboard for benchmarking purposes.
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On-site Support
HGEM team were on-site for the duration of the event to manage administrative and analytical tasks, providing a debrief at the end of every day.
Results
We saw a positive performance trend over all food and beverage sites visited across all enclosures. The average rating across all units improved by 6.25% from Day 1 to Day 5.
We were able to support individual units with real-time feedback, to help them improve performance during the event. A couple of examples:
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Norfolk Restaurant
Was visited on the 2nd day of the event, the report was reviewed with the location's GM, and the score improved by 21 percentage points on Day 5 - also the busiest day for the event.
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Pizza and Co
This location was in one of the highest footfall areas in the busiest enclosure, yet after our feedback there was a 6% uplift in score.
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Front Runner Grill
This location’s scores increased from 80% to 98% by the end of the week after multiple audits.
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We work so well with HGEM because they understand what a world-class experience should be like.
Jonathan Parker | Managing Director | 1711 by Ascot
