New Year's Eve packages: pricing the gala night, the room and the minimum stay

A New Year's Eve package is one price for room nights, a gala dinner, a drinks rule, entertainment and breakfast. Cost the gala per cover plus its fixed costs, set a minimum stay that covers 30 December, decide in-house versus outside covers, and publish terms that follow Türkiye's advertising rules.

On 1 January the restaurant is empty, the band has been paid, and two of the three nights around the gala sold nothing. The package price was set by adding a little to last year's number, and nobody can say which line of the night made money and which lost it. This guide fixes that. You will cost the gala from components, set the minimum stay from the calendar, decide the outside-ticket rule, and publish an advertisement that survives a check against the advertising regulation.

What does a New Year's Eve hotel package usually contain?#

A New Year's Eve package is one price for a bundle: the room nights around 31 December, a gala dinner with a stated drinks rule, entertainment, and breakfast on 1 January, usually served late. New year's eve hotel package pricing starts by separating what is priced per person from what is priced per room. Dinner, drinks and the gala seat are per cover; the room is per night; the band, the decoration and the security are one cost for the whole night.

Write the drinks rule in one sentence and put it on the offer: open bar for a set period, a fixed number of drinks per guest, or a welcome drink with a paid bar after it. That rule moves the cost more than the menu does. State the hours of everything the guest will ask about: gala start, last sitting, bar closing, breakfast on 1 January and check-out. Say what is not included: transfers, spa, minibar, extra beds, and any supplement for a view or a late check-out.

Decide whether the package is the only way to buy the night. If every room must take the gala, guests who want only a room will book elsewhere; if no room must, the restaurant may not fill. Not every hotel should sell a New Year's Eve package at all. A property with weak demand on 31 December, or a restaurant too small to hold its own house, is usually better off selling rooms and letting guests choose.

How do you cost a gala dinner before you set its price?#

Cost the gala line by line per cover, add the fixed costs of the night on top, and compare the result with the price you intend to charge. Start with the menu: each course, its portion, its supplier price and a wastage allowance. This is a costing sheet, not an estimate built from last year's total invoice.

Cost the drinks separately, because the drinks rule is the line that moves most between an open bar and a welcome drink. List the fixed costs of the night: band or DJ, decoration, security, cloakroom, permits, and the extra staff hours before, during and after. These do not change with the number of covers. Count the staff hours that fall after midnight and the cleaning hours on 1 January. A gala usually pays a night premium, and that premium belongs in the sheet.

Divide the fixed costs by the covers you expect, then repeat the sum at 70 percent of that number. If the night loses money at 70 percent, either the price or the fixed costs have to change. For example, a 200-cover gala with 60.000 TL of fixed costs and 900 TL of food and drink cost per cover breaks even at 1.200 TL per cover at 200 covers, and needs about 1.329 TL per cover if only 140 covers sell. The figures are illustrative; use your own.

Do not forget the room. If the package includes the room, its cost is small, but its opportunity cost is the rate you could have sold that room at on the open market.

Why does a one-night package leave 30 December and 1 January empty?#

Because a guest who buys one night arrives on 31 December and leaves on 1 January, so the nights that would fill the hotel around the gala stay unsold. A minimum stay is a rate restriction: the package can only be booked for two or three nights, with stated arrival dates. Put the rule on the offer page, not only in the terms. The mechanics of rate restrictions are worth knowing in detail; see hotel rate restrictions explained: minimum stay, CTA and CTD.

The calendar supports a specific pattern. 1 January is a general holiday under Law No. 2429 on national and general holidays (opens in a new tab) (Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, consolidated text, July 2024), so a guest who arrives on 30 December, attends the gala and leaves on 1 January loses no working day. 31 December is not in the list of general holidays in the same law, so many guests arrive after work. Check which weekday 31 December falls on before you fix the arrival dates.

Fence the minimum stay: apply it to the gala package only, and keep a small block of room-only rooms for guests who cannot commit to two nights. Sell the night after the gala deliberately: a low-priced recovery night offered only to guests already in-house fills a room that would otherwise stay empty and costs almost nothing to open. Test the rule against your own pickup. If the two-night package is not selling, the cause is usually the price of the second night, not the minimum stay itself.

Should outside guests be able to buy a gala ticket?#

Yes, but only after in-house guests have had their chance to book, and only for covers that would otherwise stay empty. Capacity is seats minus the covers the package has already promised. Count confirmed in-house adults, not the forecast, and count again a week before the night.

Give in-house guests a booking window before tickets go on sale, and say so in the offer. A guest who paid for a package and finds the room taken by ticket holders remembers it. An outside ticket spreads the fixed costs over more covers, but it also brings extra staff, cloakroom, security and a different mix at the bar. Price it from the same per-cover cost plus a share of the fixed costs, not from the package price minus the room.

Decide table sizes before you sell. A table of six sold outside can block two in-house couples, and a table plan drawn after sales start cannot be fixed. Keep a few covers unallocated for late in-house bookings and for guests who extend their stay. If the restaurant is large and the house is small, outside tickets can be the difference between a full room and a full restaurant. If it is the other way round, in-house only is simpler and keeps the promise.

How do you price children, single guests and room-only guests?#

Price each of them by what they actually consume, rather than by halving or doubling the double-room package price. For children, set age bands and say what each band includes: bed, gala seat, menu and breakfast. A free child place must state the age limit and what is not included.

Single occupancy is a different calculation. The room costs almost the same, but there is one gala cover instead of two. A single price therefore sits closer to the double price minus one cover than to half the double price. Room-only guests staying in the hotel should be able to buy the gala as a ticket, and the offer should say so. Otherwise they eat elsewhere while the seats stay empty.

Check the room's legal capacity before you sell a family package with an extra bed or a connecting room. Give every supplement its own stated price: extra bed, view, late check-out, spa. A supplement hidden inside the package price is the complaint you hear in January. How a package price is split between room, food and drinks for tax purposes is a question for your accountant. Do not settle it in the sales meeting.

When should the package go on sale, and what must the advertisement say?#

Open sales early enough to fill the shoulder nights, take a dated deposit, and publish an advertisement that shows the total price and, if you discount, the pre-discount price and the discount dates. Plan two selling windows: destination guests book travel earlier and need the package visible well ahead, while city guests decide late and need a reason in the final weeks.

Deposits and cancellations need rules before the first sale, not after the first complaint: a dated deposit deadline, a cancellation ladder with dates and amounts, and one named person who can approve exceptions. For the wording itself, see writing clear and consistent cancellation terms.

The advertising regulation sets two hard requirements. Under Article 13 of the Commercial Advertising and Unfair Commercial Practices Regulation (opens in a new tab), the price shown in an advertisement must be the total sale price including all taxes, stated in Turkish lira (Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, consolidated text, 1 August 2026). The regulation's exceptions cover package tours and education abroad, and transport and accommodation abroad, not a domestic hotel package. Under Article 14 of the same regulation (opens in a new tab), as amended in the Official Gazette of 1 July 2026 (No. 33297) and in force from 1 August 2026, an advertisement announcing a discount must state the pre-discount price and the start and end dates of the discounted sale (Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, consolidated text, 1 August 2026).

Where a service is sold through several channels, the pre-discount price comes only from the channel where the discount is offered, so keep a dated record of the price that applied on each channel just before the discount. Alcohol service, music licensing and entertainment permits sit outside this article. Confirm what applies to your property and your night with your legal adviser and your municipality before the offer goes out. If you sell under a foreign-currency contract, how that interacts with the lira rule for advertisements is a question for counsel. Do not assume one answer covers both.

For the wider discount campaign, the discount campaign checklist for prices, dates and fences covers the same rules for other seasons.

What should you record after the night?#

Record covers, costs and room nights in one sheet, so next year's gala is priced from evidence instead of memory. Count covers sold, split between in-house guests and outside tickets, with no-shows and cancellations counted by the date they happened. Put each cost line against the costing sheet: which lines overshot, and whether the cause was a price change or a quantity change.

Record the rooms too: which nights sold, at what package price, and how many rooms stayed empty on 30 December and 1 January. Note the two or three guest complaints that repeated, and the parts of the night that cost money but that nobody noticed. Write what you would change in the minimum stay, the ticket rule and the table plan while you still remember why. Keep the sheet with the offer text and the advertisements you published. Next year's costing and next year's compliance check both start there.

To place the night in its season, keep a demand calendar with holidays, school breaks and events on one sheet; the bayram dates under Law No. 2429 matter more to the rest of winter than to this one night.

What to do next#

Build two documents before you write the offer: a gala costing sheet with fixed and per-cover lines, and a stay pattern with stated arrival dates. Then price the package from those two, and check the advertisement wording against Articles 13 and 14 with your legal adviser. The night is one evening; the money is made or lost in the nights and the cost lines around it.