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Hospitality glossary · Service and operations

Corkage

Corkage is the fee a venue charges a guest for bringing their own wine or other alcohol, covering the service, the glassware and the margin the venue gives up on a bottle it did not sell.

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In practice

Corkage in a real operation.

Definitions are easy. What matters is how the thing behaves in a real operation, and where it tends to go wrong.

What it looks like in a UK hospitality business

Set it against what you would have made on a comparable bottle from your own list, not as a token amount, or every table with a wine buff becomes a table with no wet margin. Plenty of operators run corkage deliberately on quiet nights or for private parties, which is a reasonable trade when the covers would not otherwise exist. Remember the licensing position too: selling alcohol requires a premises licence, and alcohol brought in and consumed on site sits under different conditions that your licence may or may not permit.

The mistake operators make

Waiving it to keep a regular happy without working out what it costs. A venue that quietly drops corkage for anyone who asks trains its best-spending guests to stop buying wine, and wine is usually carrying a good deal of the site's gross profit.

Questions

Corkage, answered.

Something here that doesn’t match what you’re seeing in your own business? That is usually worth a conversation rather than another article.

What does corkage mean in hospitality?

Corkage is the fee a venue charges a guest for bringing their own wine or other alcohol, covering the service, the glassware and the margin the venue gives up on a bottle it did not sell. Set it against what you would have made on a comparable bottle from your own list, not as a token amount, or every table with a wine buff becomes a table with no wet margin. Plenty of operators run corkage deliberately on quiet nights or for private parties, which is a reasonable trade when the covers would not otherwise exist. Remember the licensing position too: selling alcohol requires a premises licence, and alcohol brought in and consumed on site sits under different conditions that your licence may or may not permit.

What do operators get wrong about corkage?

Waiving it to keep a regular happy without working out what it costs. A venue that quietly drops corkage for anyone who asks trains its best-spending guests to stop buying wine, and wine is usually carrying a good deal of the site's gross profit.

Related terms

Worth reading next.

Service charge

A service charge is an amount the business adds to a customer's bill on top of the price of the food and drink, usually 10% or 12.5%.

Gross profit percentage (GP%)

Gross profit percentage, or GP%, is the share of a sale left after the cost of the food or drink sold: sales minus cost of sales, divided by sales, times 100.

Premises licence

A premises licence authorises a specific building to carry out licensable activities such as selling alcohol, providing late-night refreshment or putting on regulated entertainment, under the Licensing Act 2003 in England and Wales.

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