Stampede, the Scottish hospitality software startup, today announced the launch of its Prep Starts Now campaign, with support from Visit Scotland and more than ten hospitality / tech organisations including Flipdish, Yoello, Trail and TP-Link. The campaign gives hospitality businesses access to many of the digital tools and services they need to reopen successfully during each post-lockdown stage, with partners offering free use of their services or significant discounts.

The aim of the campaign is to help businesses in the hospitality and travel sectors reopen with confidence and future-proof. It offers the advice, guidance, support, tools and tech these businesses need to grow and recover without leaning on large technology platforms like Deliveroo and Uber Eats, which take profits away from the hospitality sector. For example, the services available via Prep Starts Now will help businesses create online menus, launch click & collect services, add takeaway, loyalty programmes and create engaging digital marketing content. The campaign also provides support on difficult reopening issues like hospitality recruitment and health and safety.

In 2020, Stampede released footfall data based on 18 million hospitality customer interactions, demonstrating how slowly customers returned to hospitality venues post-lockdown – link. This was also a key driving force behind the campaign, ensuring businesses could prepare earlier, open more successfully and welcome more people back to their business.

“We saw when British hospitality businesses reopened in the summer of 2020, that they can’t be turned on and off like a tap. It took a long time for footfall and income to return to anywhere near normal levels,” said Patrick Clover, Stampede CEO and founder.

“The Prep Starts Now campaign enables hospitality businesses to prepare better and recover faster. Meanwhile, it’s also our aim to help hospitality businesses stand on their own two feet, without platforms like Uber and Google, which hurt the industry as much as they help it. It’s important that venues keep more of their profits and stay in control of their customer relationships, so that they can grow on their own terms. Many hospitality and travel businesses started the digitisation process last year out of necessity. They had to reopen in a certain way and be a certain kind of business, but this time they’ve had more time to prepare and now they can reopen as the business they want to be moving forward.”