26 Degrees in the Shade . . .

Best Time to Start a Bar Restaurant, Costa del Sol

Seasons on the Costa del Sol

To answer this question we need to consider that the Costa del Sol has three seasons in commercial terms:

1. Low season – November to March
2. Mid season – April to June
3. High season – July to October

Opening Your Spanish Bar in July

f you open your bar in July, you will be at the learning stage right when you have a very high density of customers and you simply won’t be able to produce food and drinks fast enough to keep-up with demand.

You’ll lose a lot of trade because you haven’t yet developed the skills and organized working methods, to serve people fast enough. You may even end up with a bad reputation as a result. What’s more, you’ll fail to maximize on the high turnover available in the high season which you need, to keep your monthly average up for the 12 month trading period.

Opening Your Spanish Bar in November

This is the start of the quiet period on the Costa del Sol, so you won’t have a chance to practice at producing food quickly, as you wont have the density of trade to work with. But at this time you can work to perfect your menu ideas. You’ll have to wait until March until you can really start to practice your speed-working skills and to learn how to work in an organized way, whilst under pressure.

Opening Your Spanish Bar in February

This is the favourite time to start your bar or restaurant, because you’ll have say six weeks to practice and get your system for procuring supplies, cooking food and serving before you meet the Easter rush. When any holiday occurs in Britain, you’ll have a tremendous amount of additional trade and you’ll want to be fully up to speed, so that you can maximise your turnover.

Once you’ve experienced Easter and you’ve learned how to work efficiently, business will gradually build until June when you’ll start to get really busy, and then things will just get busier and busier until the end of August when trade will start falling-off. However September and October are still pretty busy months because it’s still hot and sunny, which attracts couples who don’t have children as well as golfers and tennis players etc.

My conclusion is simple: open your business a few weeks before Easter and you will be successful and do really well!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under Business. Find similar posts by selecting and of the following tags: tips and tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.