Valentine’s Day Promotion Ideas For Your Restaurant Business
Valentine’s Day represents a major revenue opportunity for restaurants, consistently ranking as one of the largest consumer spending events in the United States. Recent data from Toast highlights Valentine’s Day 2025 as a significant sales booster for full-service restaurants, with overall Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) seeing a 34% increase compared to the average Friday in 2025. Higher guest spending drove a 17% increase in average ticket size, while overall transactions rose by 15% compared to the average Friday.
Source: Toast POS
No matter what type of restaurant you’re operating, Valentine’s Day can be a great post-holiday boost for restaurant sales. Here are some tips to help you make the most of Valentine’s Day 2026 at your restaurant.
Overall Consumer Spending Trends
Source: National Retail Federation
Americans plan to spend $5.4 billion on going out to eat, with 42% of Americans planning to dine out on Valentine’s Day—making it the most popular holiday for dining out. Candy remains the most popular Valentine’s Day gift with 56% of consumers planning to purchase it, followed by flowers (41%), greeting cards (41%), an evening out (39%), and jewelry (25%).
Celebrate Couples
Valentine’s Day is all about couples. While family and friends will go out together on the holiday, couples will most likely constitute a majority of your guests. Guests spend 21% more per person on average on Valentine’s Day versus the average day, making intimate tables deliver outsized revenue opportunities. To help ensure they come to your restaurant instead of your competitors, you might want to offer a special discount for couples. Or, you could offer some sort of free item for couples, such as a love-themed dessert, drink, or appetizer.
If possible, break up your larger tables into two-tops to help maximize party capacity and lower customer wait times.
Romanticize the Menu
Valentine’s Day is a special day for couples all across the country. So why not create a special menu for the holiday that will provide them with a more exclusive experience? Many restaurants will serve items that aren’t on their everyday menu. These items typically have a love-related theme, such as heart-shaped food and desserts, or food and drink items that are red or pink in color.
Source: Toast POS
If you can’t change up your menu, think about printing a Valentine’s Day menu of your everyday items, but with romantic names like “Lover’s Lasagna” or “Frisky Fries.”
Offer Take Out Specials
Take-out ordering continues to grow in popularity. A lot of couples will opt to spend a romantic night at home. It’s important to offer your Valentine’s Day menu or meals for two with special options to go. This will increase your overall revenue for the holiday while pleasing your customers who prefer to spend the evening at home.
Don’t Forget the Kids
A lot of couples with children will decide to make it a family outing and bring the kids along. Think about giving all of the children a grab bag of goodies, or a special kids menu with heart-shaped food items. Kids love dessert, so make sure to include it in your kid’s menu. Chocolate and strawberries are always good choices. This is a great way to attract customers with children and help the next generation of diners engage with your restaurant.
Extend Specials Into the Weekend
Valentine’s Day 2026 falls on a Saturday, making it an ideal day for dining out. However, consider extending your specials throughout the Valentine’s Day weekend or even into the following week. When Valentine’s Day falls on a Friday, some states significantly outperform others, with Utah seeing a 31% increase in traffic, Florida with 29%, Arizona with 27%, and Hawaii with 25% compared to the national average. Some businesses extend their holiday specials to an entire week or more to maximize revenue opportunities.
Encourage Reservations
Nothing ruins the mood like standing in a crowded waiting area for an hour or more. Since Valentine’s Day is one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants, it is important to encourage reservations for the holiday. OpenTable data shows that 24% of reservations are made within 48 hours and 14% just 24 hours ahead, with diners setting more “Notify Me” alerts for Valentine’s Day in 2025 than for any other holiday. Consider offering a discount or other promotion for diners who book a reservation.
Be careful not to overbook. While you want to make sure every table is full at all times, some diners will be late or will remain seated longer than expected.
Provide a Romantic Ambiance
Valentine’s Day provides a great opportunity to transform the atmosphere inside your restaurant. Some ideas might include:
- Dim the lighting slightly to a romantic – yet safe – level
- Place candles and/or flowers on the tables
- Play romantic music on your sound system
- Decorate main areas with holiday-themed decorations
- Have your front-of-house staff dress accordingly
By providing a more intimate atmosphere, your guests will remember more than just the food and drink.
Prime Service Times
Advertise and Promote
While Valentine’s Day is traditionally very busy, you still need to let your customers know about the specials you plan on having. Start by introducing signage in and around your restaurant. This will help to acquire new customers and gain the attention of passers-by.
Consider advertising locally on Google Ads or other online advertising applications. If you have social media accounts for your restaurants, you can advertise your specials there. Make sure to use appropriate hashtags. This is a great way to get the word out without spending a ton of money.
Email marketing is another great way of advertising not only Valentine’s Day specials, but any specials you have throughout the year. If you have a list of customer email addresses, make sure to send an email explaining what you are offering on Valentine’s Day. Make sure to optimize your email campaigns.
Fall In Love With Restaurant Marketing
With Bloom’s restaurant marketing platform, you can build your customer list passively, and when you send an email or SMS, you’ll be able to track open rates and even see which guests come in or order online on Valentine’s Day, or how many redeemed a digital coupon, should you include one.
Another great idea you can implement with Bloom is to offer a discount or other promotion for any guests who come back, say, in the month of February after visiting on Valentine’s Day. This is a great way to help reinforce customer engagement and loyalty.
And the best part about it is that Bloom can automate the entire process for you (and so much more)! Who doesn’t love that?
Click Here to Schedule a Free Online Demo, or call 727-877-8181 to see how we can help you save time and drive tangible results for your restaurants.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Common Questions About Restaurant Marketing
Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, rating sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.
WiFi marketing is a marketing technique that uses guest WiFi to collect & clean customer data such as names, emails, phone numbers, customer behavior, and demographics. This data is used to personalize marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty, build online reviews, and save at-risk customers. The performance of every campaign can be tracked down to the tangible ROI of a customer walking back in your door.
Restaurant reputation management is the process for restaurants to manage customer feedback and creating systems to improve customer experiences, passively build positive online reviews, and save at-risk customers. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.
A restaurant customer data platform (CDP) is a unified software system that collects, consolidates, and activates guest data from multiple sources including WiFi networks, POS systems, online ordering platforms, reservation systems, websites, loyalty platforns, event platforms, and review sites. Unlike generic CDPs built for e-commerce or SaaS companies, restaurant CDPs are purpose-built to handle restaurant-specific data sources and create actionable guest intelligence that drives personalized marketing, operational improvements, and revenue growth automatically.
Bloom Intelligence uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers. When one is recognized, the system will send them a message with an incentive to get them to return and re-establish their visit pattern. Bloom users are seeing up to 37% of churning customers return.
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