Recent case study
The benefits associated with closing a hotel for a major refurbishment or repositioning are all too often ignored.
And the actual profit lost during a rolling soft refurbishment is often less than feared.
One of our recent case studies suggests an approach to decide whether to close.
Mike Wrigley
is a lead associate at Hotel Solutions providing consulting solutions and
expertise in the areas of hotel technology, telephony and business systems knowledgebase.
Click on the icon below to download Mike's full profile.
hoteldoctor™
is a low-cost, high-value diagnostic tool involving an independent review of your hotel's key value drivers - your people, your processes and your profitability.
It creates a description of the business's value proposition and capabilities, the potential market size and competition, with estimates of market share of revenue and efficiency of conversion to EBITDA.
It forms the initial phase in the design of a pragmatic solution based on decades of real hotel executive experience.
It has application as part of vendor or buyer due diligence or to supplement the supervisory efforts of executive and non-executive management.
June 2007
hotel matters
In this issue of our newsletter, we look across a wide spectrum of issues facing our clients as they wrestle with making their hotels, their brands and their hotel companies stand out from the competition.
All of the articles below have been contributed by Hotel Solutions Partnership network members and they are coloured by recent experiences with clients. Our aim is to share our perspective on current areas of debate and on various elements of the hotel business with you.
We hope that you find the articles thought-provoking. As always, we'd welcome any comments you have about this newsletter and the topics covered in it.
Ian Graham
Principal
In recent years, the industry has seen an increasing focus on revenue management as a core element of hotel management.
Internal and external analysts have learnt to focus on RevPAR (room revenue per available room) and RGI (revenue generation index). Laudable as this is, RevPAR and RGI as goals in themselves ignore at least three issues.
Lead associate Katrina Craig writes......
Whatever your view on where value is to be added in hotel development, the facts are that the role of the operator is paramount. It seems to us that successful investors will invest in the people that lead and manage the brand and the operator.
Lead associate Rosemary Jackson writes.....
People are often appointed as leaders on the strength of their success in different and previous circumstances. Past success may not be relevant to current challenges; what is more important is to know how to learn from experience and be able to adapt rather than to do what was successful elsewhere in a different situation.
We aim to provide consultancy with a very low carbon footprint.
More than most other consultancies, our business model minimises the impact on the environment and, in respect of the travel necessary for any assignment, we now commit to buying an appropriate level of carbon offsets.
With the ten warmest-ever years all occurring since 1980, hotel operators or owners of hotel companies are increasingly managing the effect of climate change.
Many hotel owners and operators are training avoiders. Although some employers spend considerable time and resources developing employees, both on and off the job, a large number of employers do not give training and technical skills a high priority. For many, routine jobs are designed to be undertaken by unskilled labour to whom low barriers to entry, low wages, minimal training and high levels of staff turnover apply.
We are at a tipping point; the last two hundred years have been an aberration with western societies, industries, businesses and cultures in the ascendancy.