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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The Brandwatch React team