RESERVATION
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BOOKING TIPS AND IDEAS
AVOID PEAK TIMES/DATES
The Hitching Post Bar & Grill is a fully-operational restaurant, lounge, and seasonal patio — we do not have dedicated event space that sits vacant unless booked, so dining room space taken up by event bookings can displace our regular customers and cause a frustrating experience for anyone that arrives at our doors only to find us closed for the event, or at max occupancy and unable to find a seat. Customer experience is deeply important to us, so we vary event pricing based on how busy we expect to be at the time of the booking.
Peak times generally include weekends, long weekends, and special events such as the Ponoka Stampede or days with large sporting events (eg. Superbowl). When in doubt, just ask our events team coordinator for recommendations.
USE DRINK TICKETS
Our event pricing is based on a minimum spend that ensures that our business won’t lose money by hosting your event, compared with what we’d expect to earn from that day’s typical sales and staffing levels. What a lot of our event clients do is cover the cost of a food buffet (or two) and buy a fixed number of drink tickets (eg. 2 per guest). These purchases should typically cover about 3/4’s of the minimum event spend. The remaining 1/4 of the minimum spend is expected to be covered by additional purchases of drinks and finger foods by the event attendees, themselves, outside of the pre-purchased items. At the end of the night, we tally up all the purchases by event attendees and organizers, and if necessary, the organizer only covers the small spread between actual sales and the minimum spend.
PROVIDE ACCURATE GUEST COUNTS
Event pricing is often determined based on guest counts. Unfortunately, we do encounter situations where high guest counts are provided by event organizers, but fewer than half that number attend. By this point, it’s way too late for us to change event pricing — we’ve already prepared all the food for the event (all BBQ is made in advance), picked up rentals and rearranged our dining room to accommodate it, stocked our bar, scheduled more staff to work the event, changed our our public business hours to drive regular guests away, and so much more. Therefore, quoted event pricing will not be reduced if the number of guests is reduced less than 7 days prior to the event, so please try to provide us with realistic guest counts and be prepared to make up for the difference between our quoted minimum spend and your event’s actual spend in case you overestimate your guest counts.
MINIMIZE EVENT DURATION
When booking your event start/end times, tell us the time that you would like us to reserve space and seating for 30 or more guests. For example, a staff event may be scheduled to start at 2pm and formally end by 5pm, but you may know that 15-20 of your staff will probably want to linger into the evening to commiserate. We recommend that you specify 3 hours for the event and handle the lingering guests as a separate reservation, which helps keep your costs down by allowing us to reopen parts of the restaurant that were reserved for your event, while giving us a better idea of occupancy throughout the day for staffing and reservation purposes.
Reservations can be arranged with reasonably short lead time for groups of less than 30 people.
FIND US
OUR LOCATION
4405 AB-2A, Ponoka AB T4J 1J8 Canada
+1-403-783-3800 , +1-780-699-3350
[email protected]
