Restaurant Gift Vouchers: How to Set Them Up and Sell More
By Reserva
Why Restaurant Gift Vouchers Are a High-Value Opportunity
A gift voucher sold today generates revenue immediately, creates a future visit, and often brings a new customer through your door for the first time. That combination of upfront revenue plus customer acquisition makes gift vouchers one of the most capital-efficient products in hospitality.
Despite this, many UK restaurants either don't offer gift vouchers at all, or sell them through processes so manual and inconvenient that they capture only a fraction of available demand.
The Digital Voucher Advantage
Paper gift vouchers — printed, handled, and redeemed manually — create operational overhead and significant fraud risk. A lost paper voucher is typically a customer service problem with no easy resolution.
Digital gift vouchers, issued via email and stored by the recipient, solve both problems. They're:
- Instantly deliverable (no waiting for the post)
- Easy to purchase from a mobile device (critical for impulse purchases)
- Traceable (your system knows the value, status, and history of every voucher)
- Fraud-resistant (unique codes, single-use or partial-use tracking)
For a customer who wants to send a last-minute birthday gift to a food-loving friend, a digital voucher that arrives in their email within minutes is a genuinely compelling product.
Setting Up Your Gift Voucher System
A functional digital gift voucher system needs:
A purchase flow: Customers should be able to specify a value, add a personal message, and pay in under two minutes. Any more friction than this and impulse purchases are lost.
Automated delivery: The voucher should be emailed to the recipient immediately on purchase, with a unique code and clear redemption instructions.
Redemption management: Your team needs to be able to verify and redeem vouchers quickly at the point of payment. This should be a simple code lookup, not a manual spreadsheet check.
Partial redemption: Vouchers should support partial use — a £100 voucher used against a £75 bill should retain a £25 balance, not be voided.
When to Promote Gift Vouchers
Gift vouchers perform best when promoted at specific moments:
Christmas — The largest gifting period of the year. Promote vouchers from early November through Christmas Eve. A "last-minute gift" message on 23rd–24th December consistently generates strong sales.
Valentine's Day — Particularly effective for restaurants with a romantic reputation. Promote from early February.
Mother's Day and Father's Day — Consistent gifting occasions with high hospitality relevance.
Birthdays and anniversaries — Less seasonal, but a reminder to your email list that vouchers are available and perfect for occasion gifts works year-round.
Pricing and Denominations
Offer multiple denominations to suit different gifting budgets. A range of £25, £50, £75, and £100 covers most scenarios. Allow custom amounts for flexibility.
Avoid restricting vouchers to specific menus or experiences — the simpler and more flexible the redemption, the more valuable the voucher feels to the recipient.
The Revenue Retention Upside
An important advantage of gift vouchers that's rarely discussed: breakage. Industry data shows that 10–30% of gift vouchers are never redeemed (lost, forgotten, or simply never used). For voucher revenue already collected, this represents pure margin.
This doesn't mean engineering vouchers to be difficult to use — the opposite, in fact. But a well-run gift voucher programme generates slightly more revenue than the face value of vouchers actually redeemed.