It’s been a bumpy ride

The restaurant industry has suffered a lot during the pandemic. Lockdowns, strict safety measures, and consumer anxiety have hit hard, particularly for eateries based in small locations or with no outside seating.

As cases continue to rise rapidly again in the US and Europe, and some countries return to lockdown, things are looking particularly grim.

We wanted to find out how the restaurant industry is faring and if the summer, when many places saw economies reopen, helped the industry prepare for another shutdown.

Using Brandwatch Consumer Research, we collected online reviews of restaurants and meals, excluding any mentions of hotels or accommodation.

Following the logic that the more people eating out, the more reviews there will be, we figured this analysis would give us a rough idea of how the pandemic affected restaurants.

As the year began, restaurant reviews were tracking with average numbers for the last few years. So far, so good. But at the start of March numbers drop off, with reviews down 20% in the first two weeks of the month.

By April, they’re down 86% across the whole month. This is a staggering decline at a time when, in a normal year, review numbers should start to rise. For an industry where businesses often survive on razor thin margins, it’s a death knell.

We then go into summer, when restaurant reviews usually peak. We do see a summer rise in 2020, with people venturing out to eat, encouraged by eased lockdowns in some cases. Nevertheless, the recovery is weak, with reviews down 72% in the June to August period.

And as we enter winter, as eating out declines, the industry’s situation is looking incredibly dire. In October so far, review numbers are down 79%. Things are getting worse, and it’s not just the volume of reviews that’s concerning.

With the pandemic hitting hard, you might have hoped reviewers would cut kitchens a bit of slack. Apparently not.

In April and May, when things were at their worst, negative reviews made up 29% and 30% respectively of all reviews. In January they made up just 20%. So, while there were less reviews in real numbers, the restaurants who did stay open were getting worse ratings than usual.

But why? Was it that places that decided to stay open tended to be worse than other restaurants already? That’s a possible factor.

We looked at our data to see if we could find out more on what was behind the negativity, and something stood out. The biggest topics in negative reviews in March and April were “customer service,” “drivers,” and “app.” When we drilled down into the customer service topic, a lot of this was also related to various delivery apps, and delivery drivers.

What this suggests is that it’s not so much the food that’s getting a negative response, but how restaurants are getting their food to people in their homes. For businesses that had never had to do this before, there would understandably be teething problems.

That said, surely most places would have been delivering for a while. Why were they suddenly struggling to get it right?