Brandwatch Bulletin #76: Restaurants Fight Back

Diners are making up for lost time.

26 July 2021

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Table for everyone, please

Back in October last year we took a look at the restaurant industry and how it was faring since the pandemic began. It was not a pretty picture, with our data suggesting what we all expected: restaurants were struggling to get people past their doors.

It’s been ten months since then. A lot has happened in that time including changes to lockdowns around the world, mass vaccination, and the rise of new Covid variants. The question is, has the restaurant industry begun to recover?

To find out we used Brandwatch Consumer Research to find online restaurant, cafe, and diner reviews. We used an improved version of our previous query to get more accurate data too.

The thinking behind this is that review numbers can give us an insight into how many people are eating out, and therefore the health of the restaurant industry. We collected data going back to 2017 so we could also compare today’s data with the picture pre-pandemic.

Let’s see what we found out.

Above you can compare the average number of restaurant reviews posted per day for 2017-2019 to the numbers posted daily in 2020 and in 2021. This allows us to see just how much the pandemic hit the restaurant industry in March 2020, and how it’s changed since then.

What’s incredibly clear is that 2021 is looking amazing for the restaurant industry. The number of reviews posted per day overtook the 2017-2019 average in April and has been growing ever since. This suggests that either restaurants are seating more people than they were pre-pandemic, or that for some reason people are going to restaurants and feeling more inclined to leave reviews.

If there is greater footfall at restaurants, vaccinations and lifted lockdowns will be playing a major role in this. However that doesn’t explain why numbers are so much higher than they were a few years ago. It’s hard for us to pinpoint the exact reason, but we think it’s a fair assumption that after months of takeout and home cooking, people have been itching to get back into a restaurant and away from their kitchen table.

Of course we have to take these numbers with some caution. Further lockdowns and waves can’t be ruled out anywhere, while there’s the constant worry of a vaccine-beating variant emerging in the future. This apparent influx in visitors may not stick around for long.

To dig a little deeper into our reviews, we also ran a sentiment analysis to see if there were any changes on that front.

As we previously reported, positive reviews dropped as the pandemic hit. But as it turns out, this trend didn’t last long. The proportion of positive reviews hit its peak in June 2021 after growing gradually throughout the year.

Meanwhile, the proportion of negative reviews has remained incredibly stable in the same time period. When we previously covered this topic, a lot of these issues were to do with apps and delivery drivers. These negative complaints seem to have disappeared now, although a small percentage have been replaced with social distancing complaints.

All in all, things are looking pretty rosy for the restaurant industry according to our data. Long may that be the case, and we’ll see you at the buffet.

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team

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