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Local Event Footfall Watch

Example prompt: "Every morning at 8am, search for anything happening within walking distance of the restaurant today — football fixtures, concerts at the local theatre, school holidays, big weather — and send me a short note flagging anything that might push tonight's covers up or down from what the booking sheet shows, so I can decide whether to call in a runner or release a section."

The Problem

An independent restaurant's covers on a given evening are partly the booking sheet and partly everything happening within a fifteen-minute walk that the booking sheet does not know about. Saturday's match at the local ground brings in 200 walk-ins between 5pm and 7pm if the home team is playing; a Tuesday with a stadium concert is the difference between a quiet midweek and a wait at the door; the first warm Sunday of April fills the terrace and empties the dining room; an unexpected downpour at 5pm cancels the walk-in tail entirely. The owner who knows what is happening locally adjusts the staffing and the prep on the morning; the owner who finds out at 6pm either turns walk-ins away from a half-staffed floor or runs a costed-up section all night for tables that were never coming. Most owners pick up most of these from the local paper and word of mouth, and most owners miss one or two a month — the ones that cost money are not the headlines, they are the school INSET day or the local 10k that hits the lunch sitting.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that fires every morning at 8am and searches a small set of sources for anything within walking distance that day or that evening. A web-search step queries the local council events page and the local-press listings for the restaurant's postcode for events today and tomorrow. A second web-search step checks the schedule pages for the nearest stadium, theatre, and large venue — the ones the owner has named at the workflow setup. A URL-extract step pulls the day's weather forecast for the postcode and the seven-day outlook. A code step compares the day's expected covers from the bookings sheet against the same day-of-week average over the last four weeks and flags the day as already-busy, average, or already-quiet. An LLM step reads the lot — the local events, the weather, the bookings-versus-average flag — and writes a short note for the owner that names only the items worth a staffing or prep decision, with one sentence on what the call would be. The note lands in the owner's Gmail by 8.15am so the staffing and the supplier-order decisions for the day get made off it. Glass Box preview shows the assembled note before it sends so the first run can be sense-checked against a day the owner already knows about.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (scheduled): Every morning at 8am.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read the day's expected covers from the 'Reservations' tab of the bookings Google Sheet — bookings for tonight, bookings for tomorrow, walk-in tail forecast where the manager has filled it in.
  3. Step 2 (web_search): Search the local council events page and the local-press 'what's on' listings for events today and tomorrow within a fifteen-minute walk of the restaurant's postcode — the radius is set at workflow setup.
  4. Step 3 (web_search): Check the schedule pages for the named local venues — the nearest stadium, the nearest large theatre, the nearest concert venue, and the nearest university — for events tonight and tomorrow evening.
  5. Step 4 (url_extract): Pull the day's weather forecast and the seven-day outlook for the restaurant's postcode from the Met Office page.
  6. Step 5 (code): Compare the day's expected covers against the same day-of-week average over the last four weeks from the 'Service Logs' tab and tag the day as already-busy, average, or already-quiet — so the events read is framed against an actual baseline rather than against the owner's gut feel.
  7. Step 6 (llm): Assemble a short note for the owner that names only the items worth a staffing or prep decision — the home fixture that brings the walk-in tail, the stadium concert that empties the early sitting, the warm Sunday that fills the terrace, the downpour that cancels it — with one sentence on what the call would be and a flag if the day is already showing as busy on the sheet.
  8. Step 7 (integration): Email the note to the owner by 8.15am so the staffing and the prep decisions for the day get made off it.

Integrations Used

  • Google Sheets — the 'Reservations' tab for today and tomorrow's bookings and the 'Service Logs' tab for the day-of-week baseline
  • Gmail — the short morning note to the owner with the items worth a staffing or prep decision
  • Web search — the local council events page and the local-press 'what's on' listings, and the schedule pages for the named local venues
  • URL extract — the day's weather forecast and the seven-day outlook from the Met Office page

Who This Is For

Owner-operators at independent restaurants, cafes, bistros, gastropubs, and small chains whose covers are sensitive to local footfall — anywhere near a stadium, a theatre, a university, a school, or a working town centre. The workflow does not replace the owner's instinct for the neighbourhood; it makes sure the morning's staffing call has the events and the weather in front of it, so the school INSET day and the local 10k stop being the ones that get missed.

Time & Cost Saved

The owner who checks the local press and the venue pages every morning already does this job, and does it in twenty minutes if they remember every source — and they remember every source three days out of five. The workflow makes the check the same five-minute read every morning over coffee, and the value is not the twenty minutes saved, it is the staffing call that gets made an hour earlier and the prep that gets adjusted before the supplier order at 3pm rather than at 6pm. For a venue near a stadium or a theatre, the workflow pays for itself the first time it catches the midweek concert nobody had on the radar.