Saltire Hospitality x Dines: the system they now can't do without
When the Royal Highland Show moved its own hospitality operation over to Dines, every trader working the site, Saltire included, needed to run on the new system as part of that arrangement. It wasn't a switch Saltire had planned to make, but sometimes the change you didn't ask for is the one that ends up mattering most.
By Rachael Novik, Operations Manager, Dines
11 August 2026Saltire Hospitality
Introduction
Saltire is a family-run events catering business based in Edinburgh, led by David Peters. It's grown from a handful of staff to around 70 full-time, and it now caters everything from large scale events like Perth Racecourse to smaller cafés and restaurants, awards, weddings, dinners and everything in between. Along the way, Dines went from a condition of doing business at one event to the system Saltire now builds its whole operation around.
The challenge
Saltire had a picture in their head of how the business should run:
- Fast service, even on the busiest days
- Leadership who could see what was happening across every site without chasing anyone for it
- A system that grew with them rather than holding them back.
Their previous tills got in the way first. Every order meant typing it in manually, transferring the total to a Z read, then charging the customer, three steps doing the work of one. At the Royal Highland Show they had 25 separate physical tills, each with its own cash drawer and float, carried across 25 different areas of the site. Robbie Peters, a Director at Saltire, remembers it simply as: “carnage”.
If something went wrong, a support call could swallow half a day on hold. Adding one new item to the menu felt, in Robbie's words, “like solving the Da Vinci Code”. Pulling a basic sales report took longer than the sale itself was worth, and the hardware itself was unreliable.
Saltire knew what good looked like, they just didn't have the tools to get there.
The solution
The Partnership
Saltire's first experience of Dines came through the Royal Highland Show, not through choice. David Peters wasn't shy about his prediction going in: this is going to be terrible, it's not going to work. Cost was part of that scepticism too. David is a cautious operator, and a new system meant a different price to weigh up.
The results spoke for themselves. Robbie says now:
“This is class - it was so easy for us to use. Every member of staff got their own device instead of queuing behind a single till. That was a shock at first, more hardware, more to manage, but it paid for itself in extra sales almost immediately.”
Robbie Peters
Director, Saltire Hospitality
That first experience is what brought Dines into Saltire's own venues. When the old system and support became unworkable at its cafes, Eden and Ochiltree's, the switch to Dines followed. They described the transition as very smooth.
What's kept Saltire close to Dines since is the people behind the product.
“You're never more than a call, a text, or a quick email away. It's nice to have a personal face that will come and fix our problems, especially in the heat of the moment”
Perth Racecourse put that support to the test properly. This isn't a single bar with a quiet lunch service, it's thousands of people moving between multiple units across the site, all trying to get served in the short window between races. High footfall, sharp peaks, and next to no time to recover if something goes wrong.
That same support turned Robbie's biggest fear, printer-to-table service running across five or six restaurants at once during those peak windows, into one of the smoothest parts of the whole event. The Dines team worked side by side with the venue's own IT staff before a single order was placed. Perth Racecourse now runs on over 90 unique devices deployed across its bars, restaurants and hospitality areas.
“If the support isn't behind your POS system, it counts for nothing.”
The results
Robbie used to get two or three calls a week from his staff, more when the weekends got busy. Now, if he's off on a Saturday, his phone stays quiet. The team is comfortable enough with the Dines system that they don't need him.
That quiet has given him something more valuable than peace - time. David and Saltire's leadership can check the organisational dashboard themselves, watching every site's performance as it happens, instead of waiting for finance to pull the numbers together after the fact.
That's not just convenience. It means they can actually sit with the data, spot what's working and what isn't, and make decisions about where to grow next, rather than losing hours after every event just chasing down the numbers to understand what happened. Hours of someone's time given back, event after event. That's not a small thing - it's close to priceless.
The numbers speak volumes. Perth Racecourse processed over 33k transactions this season, with peak trading on Ladies Day hitting over 1400 transactions in a single hour. Through it all, Dines' offline mode kept the tills running, delivering a 99.7% offline transaction success rate on a site where a dropped signal used to mean a dropped sale.
There's a revenue uplift story here too. At recent events, average spend has climbed. Robbie credits a chunk of that to staff working with their own device in hand rather than being tied to a single till: three people selling, not one person queuing. And on the cost question that worried David early on, the system has quietly answered it itself. Higher order volumes and fewer lost sales mean it pays for itself many times over.
What's next
Saltire's confidence in Dines has started to spread across the business. Robbie has already introduced Dines to other venues and brought it to other parts of the operation. And there’s more to come - Redeemables such as prepaid tabs and vouchers are all on the list for upcoming events, starting with an awards event Saltire is catering later this year, and Perth Racecourse next in line.
Saltire are looking forward to getting the most out of the system it now runs its business on. It started as something Saltire was told to use, now it's the thing Robbie tells everyone else to use too.
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