DesignMyNight, the UK’s leading hospitality discovery and booking platform, reports that Thursday is the new Saturday after reviewing 1,136,871 bookings across the UK.
Based on analysis of more than one million bookings made in the last 11 months, Thursday is rapidly closing the gap on Saturday as the UK’s go-to night for larger groups. Average party sizes reach 4.16 on Thursdays, compared with 3.86 on Fridays and 4.24 on Saturdays.
Yet averages only tell part of the story in consumer reservation behavior. The strongest finding in the data is the surge in larger group bookings on Thursdays, with bigger parties increasingly choosing the traditionally midweek occasion over the weekend.
| GROUP SIZE | THURSDAY | FRIDAY | SATURDAY |
| 6+ | 19.6% | 17.1% | 21.5% |
| 8+ | 11.35% | 8.85% | 11.23% |
| 10+ | 7.22% | 5.21% | 6.52% |
| 12+ | 4.37% | 2.89% | 3.73% |
Katie Kirwan, Head of Brand and B2C at DesignMyNight, comments ” We definitely expected Thursday to be creeping up on Friday when it came to going out popularity, but what surprised us was that it’s Saturday it’s really going after, at least when it comes to bigger groups. Nearly one in five Thursday bookings are now for parties of six or more, and once you get to groups of ten or twelve, Thursday is very comfortably ahead of Friday. It’s not that people are giving up on the idea of the Friday night out, it’s that Thursday has become its own occasion from what we can see in our data: less about a cheeky one after work, more about actually getting the gang together before the weekend gets swallowed by everything else. Venues that still treat Thursday like a quiet night before the real business of Friday and Saturday are most likely leaving covers on the table. ”
The school night effect is still very much alive for midweek plans. Just 1.5% of Thursday bookings take place after 9pm, compared with 4.1% on Fridays. Friday also attracts a greater share of evening bookings between 5pm and 9pm, reinforcing its traditional status as the most popular and preferred post-work outing for a later night and no strict curfew.
Meanwhile, the weekend’s dominance remains unchallenged. Saturday and Sunday account for 49.6% of all bookings. Thursday may be attracting larger groups, but it is not threatening the weekend’s overall dominance; only its hold on large group bookings of 8 or more.
The data challenges the idea, and commentators claim that Thursday is “the new Friday”. Nearly a year of booking activity shows little sign of the gap between the two days closing. Instead, Thursday appears to have carved out a role of its own, attracting increasingly large groups while retaining the earlier evenings and weekday behaviours that set it apart from Friday and Saturday.