WASHINGTON — Food and beverage outlets can either be a money pit or a difference maker on property for hotels.
During a panel at the 2026 spring meeting of the Hospitality Asset Managers Association, experts said hoteliers don't have to accept food and beverage being a loss center on property, but a level of thought and planning is needed starting at the concepting stage.
How that concept fits in at the hotel and into the surrounding community are vital.
"We always encourage an overall master plan of the food and beverage and to just do a quick analysis of all the players on the property and what the opportunities are," said Jennifer Johanson, CEO and president of EDG Design.
She added that early planning "always yields more revenue potential."
Understanding where a restaurant fits not just on property but in the surrounding community is key.
"A hotel restaurant needs the local market to survive and thrive," said Omri Green, vice president of business development and consulting for Union Square Events. "If you're going to treat the restaurant as an amenity to the hotel, that's great, but then you really cap the potential of what you can do at the restaurant. When you draw the market and create something special, you build that buzz, you eventually end up creating a great restaurant that happens to be in a hotel."
When reworking existing spaces, it's important to define the scope of the work, said Carson Schroeder, chief development officer for APICII. This includes whether it's as simple as a regular refresh to bring new life into a working restaurant or food-and-beverage outlet, a repositioning to evolve the existing concept with the same name or branding, or developing a whole new concept.
"Whatever you're doing, it's dictated by a number of things like how much capital is available and what's the revenue opportunity," he said. "That underwriting exercise should be done very early in the process."
Those early stages of reworking a space should also involve full collaboration among stakeholders, including ownership and the hotel operations team, to make sure it's meeting everyone's needs.
"We really want to collaborate with operations teams to do a deep dive and understand how we can solve problems and help improve," said Marion Emmanuelle Bullot, partner at AvroKO Hospitality Group and managing director at Brand Bureau.
Expectations for food and beverage within hotels have evolved over the years, and restaurants need to evolve in tandem, she added.
"You're now seeing hotels performing tremendously through F&B and F&B being one of the key decision points for guests choosing a property," she said.
When reworking spaces, hotels have something that "was designed, conceptualized and developed 20 years ago, when behaviors were just so different," Bullot said.
Experts on the panel agreed one of the keys for success are flexibility of a concept, and Bullot said having outlets that can have pop-ups and seasonal activations on property give hoteliers an advantage.
"We really see activations in public spaces as a way to solve issues in the future," she said.
Another aspect of future-proofing is considering that Gen Z is drinking less than previous generations, so going forward, there might be less focus on alcohol, Bullot said.
"They will become the core consumer within hotels, and their behaviors and expectations are changing drastically," she said.
Green said it's key to be able to tie together on-property F&B functions — such as restaurants, in-room dining and banquets — and it's important to keep employee dining in mind, as well.
"It's really a full-spectrum approach," he said.
While loyalty is a big focus in the hotel brand world right now, Schroeder said there's not enough focus on building guest loyalty for on-property restaurants. And that doesn't mean building earn-and-burn points programs but programming in a way that gives guests a reason to come back.
"Whether that's creating a bourbon-tasting program that people can sign up for ... and we've had a lot of success using CRMs to create birthday programs," he said.