Delivery apps pose threat to hotel dining, hotelier warns

The widespread use of food delivery apps has resulted in the stagnation of hotel restaurants, according to Splendid Hospitality Group’s procurement director Austen Bushrod. 

Speaking at Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board’s UK Foodservice Forum 2026, held on 13 May at London’s One Moorgate Place, Bushrod said: “It used to be that guests at hotels outside of towns couldn’t easily go out to dinner elsewhere. Now they can get a delivery of anything.”

He also pointed out that “nothing much is changing” in hotel dining as “it’s so easy for guests to bring food in”.

Instead of focusing on lunch or dinner trade, Bushrod urged hoteliers to “make their breakfast great, because people aren’t delivering in breakfasts. Use that as the wow factor to make the change, and then you can start to emphasise provenance”.

Mark Reynolds, regional executive chef at Levy UK and national chairman of the Craft Guild of Chefs, joined Bushrod on the panel discussing ‘How will we eat?’. Responding to Bushrod’s comments, he said: “Conferencing and banqueting business is on its knees too. Hotels used to hang their hat on it, that’s how they survived.

“So I think we will see, unfortunately, a lot of these hotels that rely on conference and banqueting going the way of just selling rooms.”

In a later panel session on ‘new product development’, Andy Goss, Clermont Hotel Group’s food and beverage director, offered a counterpoint to the trend of hotel guests ordering delivery meals.

His company is trying to diversify away from the traditional room service model by deploying an app that has a ‘Deliveroo-style’ interface: “It’s got pictures of all the menu items and people go downstairs and collect the food themselves, so they feel like they’ve had Deliveroo experience. We’re using that to try and bring room service sales back up again,” he added.

Elsewhere, Reynolds pointed to the boom in stadium catering offering a bright spot for the foodservice industry, saying that the sector is attracting ever more chef talent.

“The past two exec chefs that I’ve employed to run the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium operation have both come from hospitality backgrounds. Chefs actually come to us now, they want to work in the retail side, whereas five years ago they would have turned their noses up at it.”

Earlier in the day, Bord Bia’s international insight and trends specialist Cian O’Mahony reported that the food board’s recent Sustainable Nutrition Barometer report, which surveyed 8,000 people, found that two in three UK consumers are paying a lot of attention to their nutritional choices to ensure they are healthy. This was borne out on the hospitality industry side of things, with the research also discovering that 83% of operators agreed that health and wellness is having a big impact on menu choices.

Bord Bia’s UK market manager Conor O’Sullivan summed up: “We all recognise that this is a very complex industry. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like market conditions are going to get any easier this year. But it’s important to acknowledge that the hospitality industry has shown a huge amount of resilience and adaptability over a large number of years now.

“You’re still here, you’re still growing, and I think that you should take a lot of confidence from that, because the demand is there, and the money is there to finance that demand for the right business. The focus needs to be on how we adapt to make sure that we’re in the right positions.”