Taking a Trip Abroad with Your Favorite Bar
The Dead Rabbit guests dining photo courtesy of Crown Creative
A few bars around the nation make regular excursions abroad and allow their regulars to join them for the fun. The trips are not just treats for thirsty customers; they serve different business purposes for each bar. Here's how three bars take customers (and sometimes employees) on a real trip.
El Lopo guests on a trip to Spain
El Lopo Goes to Spain
Customer loyalty
Employee retention
Connect with producers
San Francisco sherry bar El Lopo has been hosting annual trips to Spain since 2023, with planning underway for a third one this year. They have visited Madrid (to visit restaurants and bars), Rias Baixas (to drink Albarino and east seafood), Sevilla/Sanlucar/Cadiz (to drink sherry and eat “fried things”), Asturias (to drink cider and eat beans), and the Basque region (to drink txakoli and eat pintxos).
The excursions are two weeklong trips to different regions of Spain back-to-back. People can sign up for one or the other legs, but owner Daniel Azarkman says the majority of people have opted to go on both. The trip prices include “a lot of food,” “all the wine, sherry, vermouth, cider, and beer your little liver desires,” plus the visits to bars, bodegas, restaurants, etc.
Customers don’t need to be a regulars at El Lopo to sign up for a trip, but they often come back as them. “It definitely has created some new regulars for us at the bar, and has turned some casual regulars into part of the family. People are still active on our WhatsApp thread from the 2023 trip, and when they all want to see each other again there's an obvious meetup location,” Azarkman says.
El Lopo trips also feature visits to sherry, and other suppliers to strengthen relationships. El Lopo’s Azarkman says “We do fill up a suitcase or two with some special bottles and tins [but] mostly we are going to visit the producers of the things we already sell, with the intention of gaining a deeper connection to the products.”
El Lopo cellar visit
Azarkman plans the trips by himself rather than partnering with a tour company in Spain. I asked him if the trips are a lot of work – and if they’re worth it. He says, “All-in, I'd say it's about 40 hours of planning time (followed by 120+ hours in tour guide mode). Doing these trips does take a lot out of me, and my absence from this hemisphere does take a toll on the bar. But I cannot possibly complain about getting paid to go to Spain and eat and drink all the things.”
The trips also serve as an employee rewards program, as his bartenders get to come along. Azarkman says that staff need to have worked with the bar for at least six months, “with the intention of staying for 12 more months” in order to be invited.
Smuggler's Cove Rum Themed Trips
Staff perk
Customer membership reward
Strengthen brand relationships
Smugglers Cove Rumbustion Society photo credit photo credit to Ed Anderson
Martin Cate, owner of rum bar Smuggler’s Cove, hosts trips for customers that also double as staff perks after one year of employment. They have visited Belize, Martinique, Grenada, Brazil, Barbados, Guyana, and several other domestic and international locations to see distilleries and soak in the culture- and the rum.
But these trips are free for customer members of their rum tasting club called The Rumbustion Society. After a patron samples 300 different rums as part of the club, they are awarded the title of “Master of the Cove” and treated to a free distillery trip.
The customers coming along for the ride deepen their connections to each other, to the bar at home, and also to the places and products they visit. Martin Cate of Smuggler’s Cove says, “It was great to see our guests bond, and they really do become good ambassadors—very likely to suggest to a stranger sitting next to them something from the brand they visited.”
“Being a tour guide is a special kind of skill set that I'm not sure is really me at the end of the day,” says Cate. Martin and his wife (and book coauthor) Rebecca have hosted 17 trips in 15 years, declaring the 2024 trip to Jamaica the last one overseas. Cate says, “The liability, expense, and stress just got to be too much.” Their trips will continue as a perk for the Masters of the Cove, however. Cate says they’ll just be to distilleries closer to home.
The Dead Rabbit Goes to Ireland
Business extension
Strengthen brand partnerships
The Dead Rabbit guests at an Irish pub photo courtesy of Crown Creative
At The Dead Rabbit, the company is much larger and the burden of putting together and leading trips is spread between more people. The New York Irish cocktail pub now has an Austin location and a Washington, DC one on the way. They operate Irish Exit in Moynihan Train Hall in New York, and now offer Tours of Ireland as a spinoff business venture.
Fall 2025, they’ll run their second public trip to Ireland, a swankier trip “immersing travelers in modern Irish culture by way of food, drinks, and art” than the others discussed above. (The weeklong trip runs $6600 with shared hotel rooms, not including airfare.) The attendees will visit Dublin and Belfast for cooking workshops, visits to the Guinness Storehouse and Bushmills and Boann distilleries, and museum and experiences with Irish artists.
The Dead Rabbit guests strolling the streets photo courtesy of Crown Creative
In addition to being a new business venture for the company, the secondary purpose of the Dead Rabbit trips is “a method of strengthening The Dead Rabbit’s brand partner relationships,” according to Director of Irish Whiskey Mark McLaughlin.
Beyond the beer and Irish whiskey distilleries sold at The Dead Rabbit locations that the trip guests will see, they’ll visit FieldDay (a candlemaker that provides all the soaps and scents for the company) and be treated to a private dinner by Chef Mark Moriarty, who has also hosted a few ticketed dinners at The Dead Rabbit in New York.
The tours won’t be guide-less. The Dead Rabbit co-founder Jack McGarry will lead the group on a pub tour of his hometown of Belfast, and Ireland-based McLaughlin will lead a rare Irish Whiskey tasting experience at the Causeway Coast.