Excerpt: A hotel concept is the foundation of every successful hotel project. But are you unclear on what exactly a hotel concept is? Or even why you need one? We’ll introduce you to the idea of the hotel concept, what goes into creating a great and sustainable concept, and what benefits it will bring to your hotel project. Read on to learn more!
The start of each new year brings with it a spate of articles touting the most anticipated and hottest hotel openings for the year ahead, and despite the pandemic, 2021 was no different! Just take a look at this Forbes article and this Conde Nast Traveller article to get a sense for the new offerings flooding the market this year alone.
The hotel landscape looked very different 20 years ago, when there were less offerings, bigger players and clearer differentiation between brands. Today, the market is saturated. And if you factor in the disruption of new entrants, such as Airbnb and the like, it is no surprise that customers struggle when faced with so much choice.
So how do hotels discover, create and maintain their competitive edge? How do they distinguish their offering and add value to guests? How do they remain relevant to today’s consumers? The answer is with a strong and sustainable hotel concept.
A hotel concept is the basis for everything that follows. It’s the foundational idea that defines your hotel’s brand, character, product + services, sales + marketing, and more. It curates a distinctive identity in the market and in the eyes of your clearly-defined target group.
Furthermore, it acts as a strategic and creative outline on how to realise a hotel venture by piecing together various elements (“soft” and “hard” facts) and outlining to all stakeholders HOW your hotel should look and feel and WHY that is.
At MAp, we craft our hotel concepts around the following key elements:
These constituent pieces, together, form one complete whole, laying the foundation of your hotel project.
Whether you are a hotelier looking to develop a boutique hotel or are part of a hotel group looking to reposition your existing hotels, a clearly-defined and sustainable hotel concept offers many benefits:
Hotels with strong concepts are able to demand a premium price, provide a coherent guest experience, sell and market themselves smartly, recruit talented staff and a community following, and have a marketable platform when pitching for investors and partners.
Our holistic and end-to-end process for developing hotel concepts consists of the following steps:
1) Concept Discovery: Set the groundwork by looking inwards at your goals, motivations, strengths and weaknesses, and outwards at your competition, the market and innovative trends.
2) Concept Development: Using the insights collected in the Discovery phase, address each of the key elements of your hotel concept in order to define its core idea.
3) Concept Activation: Translate your hotel concept into the operations of your hotel, by applying it to your product + services, brand, and sales + marketing.
4) Concept Implementation: Identify strategic partners and ensure they are aligned and in keeping with the hotel concept, all the way up through (re-)launch.
With a strong hotel concept in place, your hotel stands out from the competition. But more importantly, it stands for something. So before kickstarting any type of hotel project, make sure you first establish what your hotel concept is. As MAp says, “First the concept, then comes the rest.”
In need of some inspiration? Check out our Hotel Concept Trends 2021 blog post.
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