What London’s drinkers think of the pubs using surge pricing

It’s Friday night, 9pm. Neon light bounces off the rain-slicked streets of Soho. London is flushed with crowds drifting up from Leicester Square into the heart of the West End, despite the wintery weather.

A cluster has formed outside O’Neills, the unfussy Irish chain pub standing beside the grand gateway which marks the entrance to Chinatown. Four high-vis clad doormen are checking IDs and giving revellers a quick frisk, sternly clicking their counters as my group enters.

It’s a relief to get inside and find the pub relatively quiet. There’s a gentle hum of people but I’d expect most pubs in Central London to be much busier at this time on a Friday. Here there’s space at the bar and I even found a table. The atmosphere is jolly and warm; again, not something that can always be said at 9pm on a Friday in this part of London.

I’ve come to this particular O’Neills, on Wardour Street, as it recently went viral for its “Unhappy Hour”: after 10pm, the pub adds a surcharge of £2 to every drink. Would the extra fee put any drinkers off buying another round?

While O’Neills has had this policy in place for two years (as I was snippily informed by its press office), it isn’t particularly well advertised. Apparently there’s an A4 sign behind the bar, but I couldn’t spot it.

O’Neills is cagey on the subject of pricing in general. Menus on the tables invite customers to download the official O’Neills app if they want to find out the cost of a pint. It’s a fairly good tactic if you don’t want your pub to resound with cries of “how much?!” all night, especially since the average price of a London pint has reached £6.63.

It does feel slightly underhand. I suppose the hope is that most won’t notice the 10pm price increase if they were not aware of the original price to begin with.

‘That’s London for you’

Indeed, when I order my drinks, both before and after the 10pm cut-off, the bartender never tells me “that’ll be £18.45/£24.45” respectively. He just waves at the card machine. A tap-happy customer might well miss the price entirely and never realise how much they were expected to pay or that there was any difference at all after 10pm.

When my boyfriend asks the barman about whether people notice the pricing discrepancy, he replies, “a few do, most don’t”. As for why the surcharge was introduced? “Because they’re b******s.”

“That’s just London for you,” shrugs Marcus, 28. He’s visiting London from “near Liverpool” as part of a mate’s stag-do and has resigned himself to high prices. “I notice the lack of prices on the menus is a common feature down here.”

Most of the O’Neills customers I spoke to were in the same boat.

“I used to go out to the pub after work at least once a week, now I’ll maybe go once a month, sometimes less,” confesses Dan, a media executive. “It’s too expensive. I didn’t know about the charge but I’m not surprised. They slap extra fees on everything nowadays.”

Dynamic pricing, where prices increase during busy times, has already been introduced across railways, taxis, takeaways, and even concert tickets.

It’s not new in the hospitality sector. Last September, Stonegate Group, the owner of bar and pub chains Slug & Lettuce and Yates’s, announced it would charge an extra 20p on pints at busier times. Meanwhile, a Greene King pub near Wembley charges extra on match days.

“The policy at Wardour Street reflects a request from the licensing authority and the police that we increase prices after 10pm to a level generally in line with the late-night market,” explained a Mitchell & Butler spokesperson, adding that “temporary price increases tend to reflect the need to offset additional costs such as at times when door security is required.”

Passing the cost

I understand the reasoning. With the pressures applied to pubs from increased alcohol duty, the looming increases in the statutory living wage and employer National Insurance contributions (which Mitchell & Butler’s CEO warns will cost the chain £100m) passing the cost to drinkers isn’t surprising.

The question is whether the additional prices being charged by pubs may serve to throttle London’s nightlife and overall tourist scene.

“It’s a vulturous practice that does nothing more than provide short-term cash boosts while driving out residents, tourists and the creatives that give Soho its unique charm,” says Nima Safaei, founder of nearby Italian restaurant 40 Dean Street. “Soho has faced tough times, yet there’s a tight-knit community where we support one another. These practices undermine what makes this place special. By preying on visitors, we risk driving them out and losing that magic. Surge pricing makes people feel unwelcome, creating mistrust and setting businesses up to struggle. When people are priced out, we all lose.”

Pubs are a huge draw for tourists visiting the UK from abroad. According to 2022 research by VisitBritain, two in five international tourists visit a pub during their trip. Yet London has been gradually climbing the rankings of most expensive places to get a pint in Europe. According to travel booking website OMIO, London was the fourth most expensive city for drinks, behind only the infamously costly Nordic states of Iceland, Norway and Finland.

“London is expensive: you know it’s expensive when you book, but it used to be easier to find a cheap thing to do,” notes Krina Salemi, 42, a Greek woman who is visiting the UK for work. “When I lived in London at 18 you could eat and drink cheaply, and if you avoided the big attractions it was easy to save money. Not so much any more.”

Is the rising cost of London enough to put Salemi off visiting in future? “It’ll make me think, definitely,” she says. “I love London but Barcelona and Rome are much cheaper. It will depend on what my Christmas bonus looks like, I guess.”

When the clock struck ten at O’Neills Wardour Street, the bar didn’t empty. Those who wanted to drink weren’t thinking about the price increase, didn’t know, or weren’t bothered. But as I noticed on entering, the pub felt quieter than it should have been on a Friday night on the approach to Christmas in a city that likes to think of itself as one of the world’s finest.

A £2 surcharge on drinks at one pub might feel insignificant for now. There are plenty of other places to get a pint. There’s been no recorded drop in tourists visiting London. But it certainly feels like something’s in the air for London’s nightlife, and it’s not good.