Hollywood Bowl under pressure from boom in darts and mini-golf bars

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Hollywood Bowl is facing intensifying competition in Britain from bars offering activities from axe-throwing to mini-golf, its boss said on Monday, as it reported record annual revenue in spite of a slowdown in the UK.

The UK’s biggest ten-pin bowling operator, which has 72 centres in the country, lifted its profit outlook for the year to the end of September on the back of strong sales across its 13 Canadian sites.

It reported record revenues of £230.4mn, up 7.2 per cent year on year, as new openings in Canada and refurbishments to existing centres prompted customers to spend more time and money at those alleys. Sales across its Canadian venues surged by 42 per cent to £30.7mn.

But like-for-like sales in the UK were flat, with revenue for its mini-golf centres falling, as it was forced to compete with a growing number of so-called competitive socialising venues.

“[Competition] has hugely increased since 2019 for sure,” chief executive Stephen Burns told the Financial Times. “There has been a big growth in experiential leisure activities [and] a whole wave of new operators coming in to try and serve that demand,” he said.

His comments follow data underlining the rising popularity of activity-focused venues in the UK, which have soared by 40 per cent since 2018 to nearly 600 this year according to Savills, marking “the biggest development the leisure sector has seen in decades”.

Burns said Hollywood Bowl was targeting a slightly different market to many of those bars, which offer anything from cricket games to darts and shuffleboard, catering towards “active families,” instead of Gen Z consumers and adults.

He added that the slowdown in its UK business was expected, following booming demand for in-person, low-cost leisure activities like bowling in the wake of the pandemic. The company was returning to a “much more normalised trading period”, he said.

Burns said new operators had been expanding “incredibly quickly” but that the proliferation of new venues had since “started to slow”.

Hollywood Bowl is now expecting to report core profits “in excess of £65mn” for the year, compared with analyst forecasts of £64.1mn, helped by tight cost controls.

The company expanded into Canada in 2022 with the acquisition of Teaquinn for £10.6mn, and is targeting a footprint of 130 venues across the UK and Canada by 2035.

Hollywood Bowl shares were up by about 3 per cent in afternoon trading on Monday.