Customer welfare
A charged phone is how people get home. What that means for a venue at closing time.
Closing time
A night out runs through the phone. Transport is an app, payment is contactless, the train ticket is a QR code, and the friend waiting up is a message away. By last orders, everything a guest needs to get home safely lives in one battery that has been draining since breakfast. This statement is about that battery: what stops with it, and what a phone charging station in the room changes at the end of the night.
The evidence
A dead phone at midnight is a welfare problem before it is a convenience problem.
82%
of 18 to 24 year olds feel unsafe on a night out once their phone is dead or dying.1
1 in 2
women feel unsafe walking alone after dark in a busy public place. Among men it is 1 in 5.2
9%
of UK payments are made in cash. The taxi, the ticket and the tab all live behind a screen.3
What the phone carries
At midnight a phone at 2% takes four things down with it.
- Transport
- Taxis are booked, tracked and paid through the guest's phone. At closing time the kerb is full of people trying to do exactly that.
- Payments
- Half of UK adults now pay by phone. When the screen goes dark, the card behind it goes with it.
- Navigation
- Live maps, last train times and the QR ticket at the barrier all sit behind the same glass.
- Staying in touch
- Shared location and the text that says safely home. Both stop at 0%, right when they matter most.
One rental
One rental
A guest who feels unsafe with a dying phone has the fix within reach of the bar. Staff hand over a power bank, and every route home switches back on.
2% at closing time
Charged from the station
- Taxi booked
- Ordered, tracked and paid from their own phone.
- Route on screen
- The last train, the night bus and the walk from the stop.
- Reachable
- Shared location and the safely home text, all the way to the door.
Existing welfare practice
Late-night venues already run serious welfare practice. Charging belongs beside it, because every one of these schemes ends with the same instruction: get the customer home safely.
- Ask for Angela
- Staff trained to step in when a customer feels unsafe usually close the situation the same way: into a taxi, home. That taxi gets booked on a phone with battery.
- Women’s Night Safety Charter
- Over 3,000 venues and organisations have signed the charter, which includes helping people get home safely at night. A station on the bar gives that pledge something physical to reach for.4
- Licensing Act 2003
- Public safety is one of the four licensing objectives every licensed venue answers to. A room where customers stay charged, reachable and able to book transport supports it directly.5
The rest of the network
The same welfare case follows guests through the rest of the network. The gym member leaving a late session for a dark car park, the traveller checked into an unfamiliar city, the student whose night out splits them from their group: each one gets home the same way, with a phone that still switches on.
Hosting a station
A venue that hosts a station keeps transport, payments, navigation and contact alive for every guest in the room. That sits alongside trained staff and the posters by the bar as part of how the venue looks after the people in it, and it belongs in the same welfare and licensing conversations.
Sources
- 1YouGov polling on night-time safety and phone battery, reported by the Night Time Industries Association, 2023. ntia.co.uk
- 2Office for National Statistics, Perceptions of personal safety and experiences of harassment, Great Britain, 2021. ons.gov.uk
- 3UK Finance, UK Payment Markets 2025. ukfinance.org.uk
- 4Safer Business Network, Women’s Night Safety Charter reaches 3,000 signatories, 2025. saferbusiness.org.uk
- 5Licensing Act 2003, section 4: the licensing objectives. legislation.gov.uk
Questions about any of this go to info@zaptpowerbanks.co.uk.