How to Plan a Venue Soft Opening

What is a venue soft opening?

A soft opening is a controlled opportunity to operate your venue with real customers before your full public launch. You might open for a shorter period, invite a smaller number of guests or offer only the parts of the venue that are ready to be tested.

The important word is controlled. A soft opening should be busy enough to reveal genuine problems, but not so busy that your team spends the entire session firefighting.

Imagine a new family activity venue preparing for its first Saturday. The booking process has been checked in the office, staff have been shown their roles and the café equipment is ready. Everything appears to work individually. What nobody yet knows is what happens when three families arrive together, one parent cannot find their booking details, another wants to add a child and somebody is waiting at the café counter to collect an order.

Those are the situations a useful venue soft opening can uncover.

The objective is not to manufacture a perfect day for invited guests. It is to discover what needs improving while attendance is still manageable.

Decide what your soft opening needs to test

Before inviting anyone, write down what you actually want to learn. Without a clear purpose, a soft opening can easily become a pleasant preview event where everyone goes home saying it went well, but nobody records whether the venue is genuinely ready for normal customers.

Your list will depend on the type of business, but useful questions might include:

• Can customers understand how to book?
• Do guests know where to go when they arrive?
• Can reception find the information it needs without delaying the queue?
• Do staff know who deals with booking questions and changes?
• Can customers understand where and how to place café orders?
• Can staff use the EPOS system confidently during a normal customer interaction?
• Are responsibilities clear when several customers need help at once?
• Do staff know what to do when a customer asks for something slightly different from the original booking?
• Are instructions, signs and customer communications understandable without a member of staff explaining them?

Keep this list practical. You are looking for observable answers rather than vague goals such as “test customer service”. A better goal would be: “Can a first-time visitor find reception and check in without being redirected?”

Choose a manageable guest list

A venue soft opening does not need to recreate your maximum capacity. In fact, starting too big can make it harder to understand why something went wrong.

Invite enough people to create genuine interactions while keeping the session manageable for your team. Think about the types of customers you expect after launch rather than simply filling spaces.

For example, depending on your venue, your trial group could include:

• a straightforward individual or family booking;
• someone visiting the venue for the first time;
• a group arriving together;
• a customer who plans to buy food or refreshments;
• a booking involving children, where that reflects your normal customers;
• a party or group booking if those form part of your normal offer.

Tell invited guests that this is a soft opening and that you are testing the experience. Be clear about what will and will not be available during their visit.

Try not to explain every step in advance simply because the guests are friends, family or invited customers. If someone would normally have to find the entrance from the information supplied with their booking, let them try. Otherwise you may accidentally remove the exact problem you need to discover.

Test the complete customer journey

One of the most useful ways to plan a venue soft opening is to stop thinking about individual systems and follow a customer from beginning to end.

A booking form can work perfectly while the arrival instructions remain confusing. Your EPOS system can be ready to take an order while staff are unclear about where the customer should wait afterwards. Each individual task can work while the overall experience still feels awkward.

A practical customer-journey test

Assign someone to watch this journey rather than concentrating only on whether individual pieces of equipment work. Note the exact point where a guest hesitates, asks for clarification or needs a member of staff to intervene.

Small moments matter. If nearly every guest asks, “Do we wait here now?”, that is useful information even if nothing technically failed.

Use the soft opening for practical staff training

Staff training before opening is essential, but explaining a process in a quiet room is different from carrying it out while customers are standing in front of you.

Give each colleague a clear role during the soft opening. Reception should concentrate on arrivals and check-in. Café staff should handle café orders. Activity or venue staff should concentrate on the part of the visit they normally manage.

If staffing allows, nominate someone separately to observe what is happening. They can record queues, repeated questions, unclear instructions and moments where colleagues have to stop what they are doing to solve another team’s problem.

A colleague taking payments should not also be expected to make detailed notes while customers are waiting.

Look for handover problems

Some of the most revealing problems happen between roles rather than within them.

For example, reception might deal correctly with a customer who asks to change something, but does the colleague affected by that change know about it? If a family asks a café colleague a question about their booking, does that colleague know where to direct them?

Watch for phrases such as:

• “I thought reception was doing that.”
• “Nobody told me it had changed.”
• “I’m not sure who deals with that.”
• “Can you wait while I find someone?”

These are useful clues that a responsibility or handover needs to be clearer before the full opening.

Test EPOS, booking software and café orders in context

Your soft opening is also an opportunity to see how the systems used by the business fit into an ordinary working day.

If your venue uses booking software, run genuine test journeys through the process your customers and staff will normally follow. If you take payments or café orders through an EPOS system, let trained staff use it as part of those customer journeys rather than performing isolated demonstrations.

The purpose is not simply to prove that a button works. Ask whether the process makes sense when there is a customer waiting.

For bookings, check the surrounding experience

Follow the booking from the customer’s point of view. Can they understand the information provided? When they arrive, can the appropriate member of staff find what they need? If the customer asks a normal question about the booking, does the team know how to respond?

For EPOS and café orders, watch the real interaction

For a venue with a café, a useful test might be a family ordering several drinks and meals while another customer is waiting behind them. Watch the whole interaction: placing the order, confirming what has been requested, taking payment and explaining what the customer should do next.

If you are still planning the technology for a new venue, our guide to EPOS for small businesses provides a useful starting point. The soft opening itself, however, should concentrate on how your chosen processes work in practice rather than introducing major new systems at the last minute.

For leisure and activity businesses, you can also read more about EPOS and booking solutions for leisure venues.

Follow a simple soft opening timetable

You do not need an elaborate event plan. You do need enough structure to make sure the day tests something useful.

The following is a hypothetical example for a venue running a two-hour guest soft-opening session, with staff briefing and preparation beforehand and a review afterwards. Adjust the timings and activities to suit your own business.

Staggering arrivals can be useful for an early trial because it gives the team time to observe individual journeys. If your venue normally experiences customers arriving together for fixed sessions, however, you should eventually test that situation too.

Introduce realistic customer scenarios

A useful soft opening includes ordinary variations, because real customers rarely follow an ideal script.

Do not try to catch staff out with bizarre requests. Choose situations they could realistically encounter during a normal week.

Hypothetical example: an extra child joins a party

A parent arrives and asks whether another child can join their party. The correct response depends on your venue’s actual availability, pricing and procedures, so the purpose of the exercise is not to prescribe the answer.

Instead, observe the process:

1. Does the colleague know what needs to be checked?
2. Can they explain the available option clearly to the customer?
3. If the change affects another member of staff, does that person find out?
4. If a payment is required under your normal process, does the colleague know what to do?
5. Does the change create a problem somewhere else in the customer journey?

Hypothetical example: a café order needs changing

A customer places a café order and then realises they are sitting at a different table from the one originally expected. Again, the exact process will depend on how your venue operates.

What matters during the soft opening is whether the team can deal with the request without creating confusion elsewhere. Does the colleague understand what needs changing? Does anyone preparing or delivering the order need to be told? Does the customer know what will happen next?

This kind of ordinary situation is more valuable than deliberately creating an unusual problem. You are testing the situations staff are likely to face when the venue is open properly.

Review what happened while it is fresh

Do not wait several days before discussing the soft opening. Bring the team together once the guests have left and while everyone can still remember the details.

Ask three straightforward questions:

1. What confused customers?
2. What made the team’s job unnecessarily difficult?
3. What worked well and should stay as it is?

Record specific observations rather than broad opinions. “The arrival process was confusing” does not tell you what to change. “Three families walked past reception because they thought check-in was upstairs” gives you something you can investigate.

Likewise, “the café was slow” is less useful than “staff had to stop taking café orders twice to answer questions about where customers should collect them”.

Separate urgent fixes from later improvements

Not every observation needs to delay your opening. Divide the list into issues that affect the basic customer journey and improvements that would simply make an already workable experience better.

For every important issue, record:

• what actually happened;
• where in the customer journey it happened;
• what you think needs changing;
• who will take responsibility for the change;
• when it will be completed; and
• how you will check that the change has worked.

This keeps the review practical. A list of twenty observations is not especially useful if nobody knows which ones matter most or who is dealing with them.

Fix and retest the important problems

A completed change is not the same as a proven solution.

If guests struggled to find the entrance and you rewrite the arrival information, ask someone unfamiliar with the venue to follow the new instructions. If customers did not know where to wait for café orders, test the revised process with another order. If staff were unsure how to deal with a booking change, rehearse another realistic change.

Try to use a fresh pair of eyes where possible. Someone who already knows exactly where the entrance is cannot easily judge whether new directions are clear to a first-time visitor.

You may decide that one soft opening is enough. You may instead find that an important part of the customer journey needs another limited trial. The decision should come from what you observed rather than from feeling that a soft opening is something you only get one chance to do.

The aim is not perfection. Real customers will always ask questions and unexpected situations will still happen. What you want is a venue where the normal journey makes sense and staff understand how to respond when something changes.

Venue soft opening checklist

Use this soft opening checklist as a starting point and adapt it to the way your venue actually operates.

Before the soft opening

• Decide exactly what you want the trial to test.
• Choose a manageable number and mix of guests.
• Tell guests that they are attending a soft opening and explain what will be available.
• Make sure the venue is ready to receive visitors under your normal operating arrangements.
• Confirm each member of staff’s role.
• Choose someone to record observations if staffing allows.
• Run through the complete booking and arrival journey.
• Check that trained staff are ready to use the EPOS system, booking software and other processes they need for the session.
• Prepare a few realistic customer scenarios rather than artificial tests.

During the soft opening

• Let guests follow the normal instructions instead of guiding them through every step.
• Watch where customers stop, hesitate or ask questions.
• Observe handovers between reception, café and other venue staff.
• Follow bookings and café orders through the whole process rather than checking only that they can be entered.
• Record repeated questions.
• Test at least one ordinary change or request.
• Notice where staff need to leave their normal role to solve another problem.
• Ask guests for concise feedback about anything they found unclear.

After the soft opening

• Hold a staff review before the details are forgotten.
• Write down specific observations rather than general impressions.
• Identify the problems that need addressing before the main opening.
• Give each important action an owner and a completion date.
• Retest important changes rather than assuming they have solved the problem.
• Decide whether another limited rehearsal would be useful.

A good soft opening should make the real opening easier

Planning a venue soft opening is not about staging a smaller version of your launch party. It is about giving real customers enough freedom to show you what running the venue actually feels like.

Follow the whole visit. Watch the moments between systems and staff roles. Pay attention when somebody asks a question you thought the answer to was obvious. Test realistic changes. Then turn what you learn into specific improvements and check those improvements again.

That approach can be useful whether you are opening a café, family activity venue, leisure business or another customer-facing operation. The details will differ, but the principle remains the same: test the experience people will actually have, not just the individual parts behind it.

For businesses still preparing their systems, you can explore EPOS for small businesses or learn more about EPOS software. EPOS Bookings provides EPOS and booking solutions for businesses across the UK.