A hotel is a solid beast of an asset, the very opposite to Bitcoin. It exists in a set location. You can touch it. Making changes requires closures, dust, tarpaulins and undesirable disruption. And, yet, like Bitcoin, its success can rest on the most ephemeral factors. The value of this hulk of bricks and mortar can be washed away by something as intangible as a poor review.
The run-up to a hotel opening is where the future success of a hotel will be established and it happens in three distinct phases, between positioning the property commercially to welcoming the first guests.
It’s easy to focus on the actual physical opening of the hotel first, because that’s the bit you can see. With every piece of unlaid flooring and hanging wire comes the fear that the hotel won’t open on time and there will be money lost in overruns and money and goodwill lost in cancelled bookings. So laying the tiles feels like it should come first.
But for a hotel to open successfully, a commercial team needs to be in place to fill those rooms with their smoothly-laid tiles. You may have had a clear idea of what the hotel was in your head for the past year, or even your lifetime, but your commercial team also needs time to understand that idea and create a detailed revenue strategy that perfectly reflects the hotel’s position.
This means assessing the local market and your competitive set, deciding a rate strategy and looking at your channel mix, all of which will change depending on the time of year and the movement of the different demand drivers.
This should be achieved in the first of the three pre-opening phases. By the time you get to 60 days out, your commercial team should be established and buzzing along. It is now time to think about the team who will be delivering the service for which your guests will be paying that optimized rate.
In the economy sector, service can and increasingly is being delivered by an app and a welcoming email, but in the luxury market, service is significantly more nuanced and relies on a culture with a strict and well-established structure.
This cannot be learned in a week using a laminated card taped on the wall, but through weeks of scenario rehearsal, brand immersion and leadership-driven training. All team members must know the role they are playing in your carefully-choreographed operation, or the guest will be able to see that the magic that is expert luxury service is nothing more than a pretender hiding behind a curtain pretending to be a wizard.
With the team honed by day 30, the final stretch sees the doors finally open, at least a bit. It might be tempting to get past the soft opening phase and go straight to the full opening — how hard can it be? — but a rigorous dress rehearsal prevents tears and pandemonium on the first night.
This is particularly important in a hotel, which is a significantly more complicated operation than a theatre and grows more so by the day. To borrow from the automotive sector, the average person on the street could fix a Model T Ford, but even the most minor issue with a modern car requires a full IT team. So too with hotels, where there are plenty of opportunities for key card systems to fail, POS to drop off over breakfast and the booking itself failing to show. Guests trapped outside their rooms, starved of breakfast and waiving their proof of reservations at you at the front desk do not write nice reviews afterwards. Although it is more than likely that they will tell their friends — just not in a good way.
It’s easy to look at the above and think that maybe you won’t bother with a hotel. Maybe you’ll open a coffee cart or get into personalized stationery instead. But console yourself with the knowledge that, with that 90-day foundation in place, your hotel will outlast most other businesses and even last for generations. Unlike Bitcoin.
Leanne Reddie is chief commercial of Global Asset Solutions.
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