The poolside bar: the most profitable area, and the least served

By the pool, guests spend more consecutive hours than anywhere else in the property, and spend less money than anywhere else in the property. The reason isn't the price list: it's the metres between them and the bar.

The poolside paradox

A guest by the pool has three traits that, in any other setting, would make them the ideal customer: they are staying put, they have time and they have nothing else to do. They also have three traits that make them the hardest to serve: they are half-dressed, they haven't got their wallet with them and, if they get up, they have to put their shoes back on.

Almost everything else follows from this paradox. The pool bar is designed as a bar — a counter, a queue, customers come up to order — in an area where the customer, by definition, doesn't come up. And the classic alternative, a waiter circulating between the loungers, only holds up in two cases: small properties, or short peak hours.

Why table service doesn't scale

Sending a waiter to the back row for a coffee has a cost in minutes that any operator knows: the walk out, waiting for the answer, the walk back to the bar, the preparation, the second walk. For a single order worth a few euros the sums don't add up, and that has nothing to do with anyone's skill.

The result is that almost every property settles into an unspoken compromise: the area in front of the bar is served well, the rest is served by sight, and the far rows make do. Which is also why the spots furthest from the bar are the first to be discounted: not because of the view, but because whoever takes them knows they will be served less.

The hours when nobody orders anything

There is a detail that gets missed when you only look at total takings: the poolside doesn't lose orders at peak times. At peak times people get up and go, because there is movement and because everyone else is doing it.

The orders are lost in the soft hours. Eleven in the morning, four in the afternoon: hours when nobody wants to break off from a book, a nap or the sun to cross the sun terrace, and when an order placed without getting up would be an order out of nowhere. They are also the hours when the bar is quiet and could produce at no extra cost.

Looking at pool bar takings hour by hour, rather than at the end of the day, is the only way to see this gap. In many properties the curve has two peaks and a flat afternoon: that flat stretch isn't how a guest on holiday naturally behaves, it is a consequence of how service is organised.

The areas that never get counted

In properties of a certain size there is also a set of places where, quite simply, nobody passes: the cabanas, the side lawns, the hot-tub areas, the rooftop sun terraces, the private areas. They have two things in common: they are the ones the property sells at the highest price, and they are the ones where it is hardest to get served.

This is where an attentive general manager finds the biggest contradiction in their own offer: the most expensive spot is served worse than a table at the bar.

Three things you can observe without buying anything

Pool bar takings by time slot. If the afternoon is flat, the problem is distance, not the menu.

How many spots are out of sight from the bar. You count them on foot. There are usually more than half.

How many orders, on average, a guest places over a full day by the pool. You don't need a precise number: just ask whether it is more or less than they would order in the same time sitting in a city bar. The answer, almost always, says the problem isn't thirst.

What really changes

Any solution that works by the pool has to respect three constraints, or it won't be used: it mustn't ask the guest to get up, it mustn't ask them to install anything, and it must tell the staff where to take the order, because an order without an address in an area of two hundred loungers is an order somebody has to go and find.

They are obvious constraints, and they are the reason poolside service has remained, for years, the last unsolved area in many properties that run perfectly everywhere else.