Discover insider tips, advice, and stories to help your business connect with customers, increase revenue, and streamline operations.
GoTab, the entertainment commerce platform built for breweries, taprooms, beer gardens, and other high-volume hospitality venues, today announced the release of its new industry report, The Playbook for High-Volume Taprooms & Beer Gardens: Brewery Guest Experience Strategies.
For entertainment venues, breweries, food halls, pickleball clubs, bowling centers, dine-in cinemas, and other experience-driven businesses, the questions become much more specific. The difference between a traditional restaurant POS and a platform built for dynamic hospitality often shows up in the edge cases. The questions below came directly from a recent evaluation with an experienced hospitality operations team. They reveal the kinds of challenges modern operators face every day—and the capabilities they should expect from their technology.
Today's guests expect convenience. They want to order from wherever they are, pay without waiting, and enjoy a seamless experience from start to finish. At the same time, operators need technology that can support multiple service models, improve staff productivity, and provide real-time visibility into business performance. That's why more operators are adopting tablet-based point of sale systems.
With this integration, operators can now unify gameplay, food and beverage, and retail purchases on a single guest tab. Guests receive an RFID card linked directly to their GoTab tab initiated at the Point-of-Sale, allowing them to tap and play games and attractions while all charges automatically post alongside food and beverage purchases for a single, seamless checkout experience.
With so many brewery technology solutions competing for attention, how can operators separate meaningful innovation from expensive distractions? In this article, Mike Wakerly, founder of Taplist.io, shares a practical framework for evaluating technology investments based on real operational impact. Learn how successful breweries cut through the noise, focus on solving actual business problems, and build a technology stack that improves the guest experience, streamlines operations, and drives measurable results.
We recently analyzed ordering and payment behavior across breweries, food halls, restaurants, and entertainment venues using anonymized data from real GoTab operators. While every venue is different, one trend appeared consistently across nearly every category:Operators that combine traditional service with guest-driven ordering are generating larger tabs and capturing more tips than operators relying on a single ordering method alone.
GoTab, the entertainment commerce platform built for dynamic restaurants, breweries, food halls, hotels, and entertainment venues, today announced the acquisition of the Fishbowl guest relationship management platform, one of the hospitality industry’s most established customer data, marketing, and loyalty platforms.
With 280 seats inside and 50-seats outside in Shrewsbury, Missouri -- an inner-ring suburb of downtown St. Louis -- founder Sunny Bhalla operates several service models at once. My Place includes a full-service dining room, a café, a 51-tap self-pour beer wall and an automated cocktail bar. The cocktail bar runs on Smart Bar USA, a system also used in casinos, resorts and cruise lines.
As movie theaters continue to compete with streaming services and changing consumer habits, many operators are rethinking what the cinema experience should look like. Today's most successful theaters are not simply showing movies. They are creating destinations that combine entertainment, food and beverage, hospitality, and community engagement.
For brewery owners and operators, that creates an opportunity. A well-designed donation program can strengthen community relationships, increase guest engagement, support local nonprofits, and reinforce your brand's mission—all while fitting naturally into everyday operations.
New checkout donation capability enables breweries, taprooms, restaurants, and entertainment venues to support local nonprofits directly through the guest payment experience.
For decades, restaurant chefs relied on kitchen printers and paper tickets to communicate orders from the front of house to the back of house. Today, many operators are replacing those workflows with a restaurant kitchen display system (KDS). But is a kitchen display screen really better than a kitchen printer? The answer depends on your operation, but for most modern restaurants, breweries, food halls, entertainment venues, and hospitality businesses, the benefits of a KDS restaurant solution are difficult to ignore.
Every restaurant operator has experienced it. The kitchen is busy. Orders are coming in from multiple channels. A server updates a ticket after it's been sent. A guest requests a modification. A delivery order appears during the dinner rush. Suddenly, communication breaks down. Tickets are lost. Items are delayed. Food sits waiting in the window. Guests wait longer than expected.
The GoTab entertainment commerce platform handles the full-bar menu, online and tab ordering, and the comps and discounts that keep the loyalty programs running smoothly for a beer garden, off-leash dog park, tap room and brew house that can hold a couple hundred guests at once. It is the backbone that helps a large team move hundreds of guests through a seven-day operation without losing the thread.
The busiest taproom and beer gardens have figured out how to reduce friction while still delivering hospitality. That was one of the clearest takeaways from GoTab’s recent webinar, How High-Volume Breweries and Taprooms Increase Efficiency and Guest Spend, led by hospitality veteran Adam Howe.
In a recent episode of Behind the Tab, Crushyard General Manager Joe De La Torre shared how the company has evolved from its first location in Charleston to a rapidly expanding multi-location entertainment brand with locations in Orlando, Nashville, and additional franchise growth already underway. And perhaps most importantly, he explained what they learned along the way.
In the latest episode of Behind the Tab, Patricia Mejia sat down with brewery and hospitality leaders to unpack what that shift means for operators navigating a more mature, more competitive, and more operationally demanding craft beer landscape.
When your taproom is packed, long lines are more than an inconvenience. They’re a direct hit to revenue. Every minute a guest spends waiting at the bar is a minute they’re not relaxing, ordering another round, or adding food to their tab. That was the challenge facing The Patch Brewery. Built on a 145-year-old family farm in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, The Patch combines a brewery, beer garden, and family-friendly destination with seating for more than 400 guests. On busy weekends, demand was strong, but service bottlenecks were getting in the way. Guests were waiting 30 to 40 minutes just to order a beer.
When Green Gables Bar & Grill reopened after a devastating fire, ownership had an opportunity to rethink more than just the building.They wanted to preserve the spirit of a beloved local institution while creating a more efficient operation built for the future. That meant replacing outdated workflows with a modern technology stack centered around GoTab’s fast casual POS and automated kitchen display system (KDS). The result? Faster service, better kitchen communication, and a guest experience that feels both modern and familiar.
Food halls are on the rise, but Relish Food Hall // Pickleball is not following the standard playbook. The Louisville, Colorado, venue combines competitive pickleball and multi-vendor dining under one roof, creating a hospitality model designed to keep guests moving seamlessly between recreation and dining.
