What Digital Hospitality Really Means in 2025
Hospitality is no longer limited to dining rooms and table service — it’s happening every time a guest opens their phone. In 2025, the real test of hospitality is how your brand shows up online.
Convenience, Speed, Personalization
Hospitality has always been more than service, it’s the craft of making people feel cared for, seen, and valued. In the dining room, it’s the small things, a table that feels like it was saved just for you or a server who remembers your name.
Those small details are what turn a meal into an experience.
In 2025, more and more of those moments are happening online.
When a guest searches for your restaurant, browses your menu, places an order, or waits for a delivery update, that interaction carries the same opportunity as a complimentary course to thank you for visiting. That’s where hospitality lives now, too.
At Figure 8, we call this digital hospitality. And we believe it’s the cornerstone of a restaurant’s success today and tomorrow.
Off-Premises Dining and the Digital Restaurant Reality
It used to be simple: guests walked into your restaurant, and the dining room was where hospitality happened. Today, people are meeting your brand in all kinds of places and may never walk through the door..
The digital experience has become the front door of your restaurant, shaping first impressions long before many guests ever set a foot inside. Digital is any interaction guests have with your brand that isn’t a face to face encounter with another human being. And that is a lot – the search results that appear when someone looks you up, the reviews they read, the menu they browse, and the ordering flow they click through. It’s the photos they see, the delivery updates they receive, and the loyalty programs they join.
The data makes it clear: guest behavior is shifting at a rapid pace.
- Off-premises is becoming dominant. Nearly 75% of all restaurant traffic happens through takeout, delivery, drive-thru, and online ordering platforms. This now accounts for a larger share of sales than before the pandemic — 58% for limited-service and 41% for full-service operators.1
- Habits have shifted. About 47% of adults get takeout weekly, 42% use the drive-thru weekly, and 37% order delivery weekly. For Millennials and Gen Z, those numbers are even higher, more than six in ten say they use these channels more now than just a year ago.2
- Digital convenience drives loyalty. Guests who order online are 67% more likely to return than those who don’t. Seamless digital experiences don’t just meet expectations, they grow repeat business.3
By focusing on the digital guest experience, restaurants can unlock new revenue streams, strengthen brand visibility, and build deeper loyalty with every order. Digital isn’t a side channel anymore, it’s where the growth is. Restaurants that don’t take their digital presence seriously risk losing relevance, revenue, and guest loyalty.
The shift to off-premises and digital-first dining means restaurants need to rethink how hospitality shows up online. In our next post, we’ll break down what digital hospitality looks like in practice.
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3 https://oysterlink.com/spotlight/restaurant-consumer-trends
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