Hyde Park Winter Wonderland is, by some distance, the most operationally complex F&B environment in the UK. Six million visitors over forty-one days. Two hundred independent traders, each with their own menu, VAT status, and tip policy.
01 — The briefEvery venue is different. This one was a city.
When IMG, the operator behind Winter Wonderland, came to us in March 2025, they were running on a stitched-together stack: three POS systems, two payment providers, and a settlement process that involved a person, a printer, and a highlighter.
Winter Wonderland is not really a venue. It's a 24-hectare temporary city in the middle of Hyde Park with its own power grid, water supply, security force, and tax structure. Each trader is a separate legal entity.
02 — The rollout200 traders, 8 weeks, one weekend.
Onboarding 200 independent traders is a logistics problem with a software problem inside it. We compressed a three-month onboarding into eight weeks by giving each trader a QR-coded pack and running a 90-minute soak session on site.
For the first time I've worked Winter Wonderland, opening weekend felt boring. That's the highest compliment I can pay a piece of software.
— Cara Doyle, Head of Operations, IMG
03 — Boxing Day, 14:42The 9 seconds that mattered.
At 14:42 on Boxing Day, the substation feeding the western half of the site tripped. Within 9 seconds, every iPad's embedded eSIM had taken over and tills resumed accepting card payments — the customer, mid-Glühwein order, noticed nothing.
The 29-minute window in numbers.
04 — Tilly on the night shiftVoice-driven ops on a 200-stall site.
By Christmas Eve, two thirds of operational queries were going through Tilly, our voice-driven AI ops assistant, instead of the dashboard. The duty manager could redeploy floor staff in under 90 seconds. They did so, on average, eleven times a night.
05 — The numbersWhat 41 days of trading actually looked like.
- £18.2m in card transactions across 200 traders.
- 99.94% transaction success rate.
- 0 reconciliation disputes raised post-season. The 2024 season had 47.
- 14 days from final trading day to last trader paid in full.
Jess leads the team that embeds with venues during peak seasons. She spent 38 of the 41 Winter Wonderland trading days on site.
