On-Consumption

On-consumption meaning.

On-consumption refers to how the cost of food and beverages is calculated when ordered for a group. Hospitality (food and drink) options are generally divided into on-consumption or a per-person package.

What does it mean to be served on-consumption?

If you rent a hospitality suite, host a networking event, or distribute alcohol in your trade show booth and select the on-consumption option, you will pay for every drink consumed by your attendees. Each drink has a standard price. The cost of the drinks is added up at the end of the night, and you are charged for the actual number and types of drinks ordered.

On-consumption vs. drinks package: Which is the better value?

It can be confusing which option to select. You know this will be an additional cost to your trade show budget, but you are willing to pay it to show your attendees a good time. On the other hand, you don’t have an unlimited budget and can’t afford to spend all kinds of money on alcohol.

There is no one-size-fits-all rule. The venue, the cost per drink, the types of alcohol you choose to offer, and how much your guests drink all impact the cost.

Consider the number and type of people who will be attending your event or stopping by your booth. At a trade show, this can sometimes be difficult to calculate specifically, but you must have a general idea.

For example, suppose you have rented a small hospitality suite in the show hotel for a one-and-a-half-hour networking reception and invited 25 potential customers to meet with you before heading off to dinner.

In that case, you may want to select the on-consumption option. You have a limited time (1.5 hours) in which people can drink, and you have a limited number of attendees (25 invitees plus your employees). While your attendees will be able to drink as much as they want, the purpose of the visit is not necessarily to drink but to talk about your business and customer needs. So, the drinking will be limited.

Suppose you are holding a large networking event at a sports complex. Over a 4-hour timeframe, attendees will be able to mingle with each other, play games, and have a fun, casual evening. In that case, the attendees can drink quite a lot. As a result, you may want to select one of the facility’s drinks packages. You will be billed one price per person for the whole evening, no matter how much they drink.

How many drinks should I calculate per hour?

To know how much your on-consumption bill could be, you must calculate how many drinks your group could have throughout your event. The average number of drinks one person will have in an hour is 1.5 to 2.

Using our example above, each attendee to the small event in the hospitality suite may drink closer to 1 or 1.5 drinks per hour. The reception will take place in the early evening. They will be going to dinner when the reception is over, where they will be drinking more, and may have a party to go to after that - so they are pacing themselves.

The attendees of the large event at the sports complex are going there to have a fun night out. While a small number of attendees may not drink alcohol at all, most attendees will drink more than they usually do at home.

A small subset may actually have “drinking as much as they can” as one of their goals for the evening. In this case, you may want to use two drinks per hour in your on-consumption calculation.

Don’t forget, at these events it is common for someone to order a drink, put it down to speak with someone or play a game, forget which drink is theirs, and return to the bar for another drink even though they never finished their previous drink.

You should consider all of these things when deciding whether the on-consumption or drinks package is best for you and your budget.