Ask three managers in the same group who their regulars are and you will get three different lists, assembled by memory, weighted heavily toward whoever was in last week and whoever is friendly at the bar.
This is not a failure of the managers. "Regular" is a feeling, and feelings do not survive nine locations and staff turnover.
If you want to act on the idea — brief a host, build an audience, notice an absence — it has to become a definition. Here is how to write one that fits your concept rather than someone else's.
Frequency alone is a bad definition
The instinct is to pick a number of visits. Four a year, say. But four visits a year means completely different things depending on what you run.
At a destination restaurant where the average guest comes once for an anniversary, four visits a year is extraordinary devotion. At a neighbourhood coffee bar, four visits a year is a tourist.
The number is not transferable. What transfers is the method for choosing it.
Start from your own distribution, not a benchmark
The only defensible definition comes from your own data. The method is simple enough to do in a spreadsheet in an afternoon.
- Take everyone who has visited in the last 24 months.
- Count completed visits per guest. Ignore cancellations and no-shows for now.
- Sort descending and find where the curve flattens — where each additional guest stops adding much. That break is usually a more honest line than any round number.
- Sanity-check it against your floor team. If your definition says nearly half your guests are regulars, your managers will tell you it is wrong, and they will be right.
Add recency, or you will be wrong constantly
A guest who came twenty times and stopped eighteen months ago is not a regular. They are a former regular, which is a completely different situation requiring a completely different message.
Any usable definition has two dimensions: how often, and how recently. Frequency without recency produces a list full of people who have moved cities.
REGULAR 4+ completed visits in the last 12 months AND at least one visit in the last 90 days LAPSED REGULAR 4+ completed visits in the last 24 months AND no visit in the last 90 days The second group is where the money is. They already like you.
Decide whether spend belongs in it
Tempting, and often a mistake. Adding a spend threshold turns "regular" into "valuable," and those are genuinely different ideas that deserve different names.
The guest who comes every Tuesday, sits at the bar, and spends forty pounds is a regular by any sensible reading of the word. Excluding them because they do not order wine will produce a list your staff does not recognise, and a list your staff does not recognise will not get used.
Keep them separate. Have a "regular" definition and a "high value" definition, and let a guest be one, both, or neither.
For groups: decide whether it is per-location or group-wide
This is the question multi-concept groups get stuck on, and there is no universal right answer — but there is a right answer for you.
A guest who visits four of your concepts twice each is a devoted supporter of the group and a stranger at every individual door. If your definition is per-location, they are invisible. If it is group-wide, your host at the newest site gets told they are a regular and then cannot place them, which is its own awkwardness.
Most groups end up wanting both: a group-level relationship status for marketing, and a location-level one for service. That is more bookkeeping than a spreadsheet comfortably holds, which is usually the point at which people start looking at software.
Write it down and put it somewhere shared
The definition is worth less than the fact that everyone uses the same one. A mediocre definition applied consistently across nine locations beats a brilliant one that lives in the head of a director of operations.
Put it in writing. Put it where GMs can see it. Revisit it once a year, and expect to move the number as your concept changes.