Three days of ANZAC trade buoys hospitality's return

The Australian Hotels Association (NSW) says that hotels across the state benefited from strong trade over the three day ANZAC Day long weekend.

The New South Wales Government permitted pubs and clubs to organise and host two-up over the entire 2022 ANZAC Day long weekend as well as introduced fare free public transport for the period.

AHA NSW Director of Liquor and Policing John Green said, “Allowing two-up over the entire three-day period helped hotels spread crowd numbers right across the long weekend, which in turn helped us with the chronic staff shortages."

Nick Tindall of the Laundy Group said that trade across all venues was strong but that its newest venue, The Log Cabin in Penrith, exceeded expectations.

“Across all of our hotels, ANZAC Day was solid and comfortably beat 2021 but takings failed to match ANZAC Day 2019 which was a record breaker. That’s largely to do with Anzac Day falling on the Friday in 2019," he said.

“However, our new pub, The Log Cabin in Penrith, well, we opened last Friday and have been absolutely slammed since then. We hit our weekly forecast budget after two days of trade!”

Mr Green says that it is important that people keep moving back in to the city centre so that it returns to being a place to work, socialise and drive commerce.

“As we move into winter, if we want to re-vitalise business it’s important to keep the momentum of events in the CBD,” he said. 

“We have Whisk(e)y in the Rocks this weekend, and then VIVID which should see good visitor numbers coming into the CBD in a traditionally quieter period.”