HGEM is a Business Reporter client

A 50-site restaurant group generates guest experience data from half a dozen different sources – separate logins, separate reports and different versions of how each venue is performing. A poor review trend at one venue might take weeks to surface. A drop in guest satisfaction scores might not reach the general manager until long after the problem has cost real revenue. Meanwhile, the team on the floor is making decisions based on instinct rather than evidence, because the evidence is buried across systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

This is the insight gap, and it is the problem HGEM was built to solve.

Founded in Bath in 2003, HGEM is part of Volaris Group, a division of Constellation Software – ranked among the world’s five most trustworthy companies by Newsweek. HGEM pioneered mystery dining in the UK and coined the term “guest experience management”. Today it works with operators including Wagamama, PizzaExpress, Dishoom, Tortilla and Flight Club, giving their teams one place to see and act on everything that shapes a guest’s experience. That place is The Hub. It finds what is going wrong across every venue, tells operators exactly what to fix and tracks whether the fix actually lands. A general manager opens it in the morning and knows immediately where to focus. An operations director sees which venues are improving, which are slipping, and why – without waiting for someone to compile a report.

Then there is Halo, hospitality’s first AI built for guest experience. The moment a user opens The Hub, Halo has already analysed the data in view and surfaced the most significant performance movements with recommended actions and evidence behind each one. But Halo goes further: it generates action plans with named owners and deadlines, responds to online reviews in the brand’s voice, drafts recovery responses to unhappy guests and projects the likely revenue impact of operational changes before they are made. For time-pressed operators running 20, 50 or 150 venues, Halo turns a morning spent reading reports into a five-minute briefing with a clear plan attached.

The proof is commercial. Tortilla saw a 49-point NPS improvement within 12 months of adopting the full HGEM programme. PizzaExpress moved its review response rate from 1 per cent to 84 per cent in six months, with a 0.25 star rating uplift across 370 venues.

Nearly three quarters – 73 per cent – of restaurant operators are investing in AI in 2026, but only 5 per cent report measurable value. Most tools stop at visibility – they show what happened then leave it to the operator. HGEM closes the loop: measure the experience, understand what is driving it, act on the root cause and track whether the improvement lands. The team behind it includes former hospitality operators who understand that insight means nothing if it does not reach the person running the floor on a Saturday night.

Since its founding, HGEM’s focus has sharpened, not changed: closing the gap between what a guest experiences and what an operator can see, one venue at a time. For the 50-site operator still piecing together six different reports, that gap is exactly where Halo now sits.