Hotel F&B Renovations – Increasing Your Odds of Success

Increasing your odds of success in a Hotel F&B renovation project

According to a recent Asset Manager survey 87% of F&B renovation projects underperformed against the planned revenue and profit growth expectations. Yet owners continue to make that capital investment because the opportunity is obvious. Unless your B$RN ratio is above $15, something is keeping hotel guests from patronizing your bar. (B$RN – How Is Your Hotel Bar Doing) 25 more customers per night in your bar is a $1M annual revenue impact – and those additional customers are often already in the hotel.

Why do the expected growth results not materialize? Sometimes the renovation is off target. Designers and more restaurant oriented concept folks dominate the planning process. If the final design is not a Living Room Bar (Living Room Bar Concepts – A Winning Formula For Hotels/Resorts) and the layout has not been optimized for the target customer – extended hangout customer,(Extended Hangout Customers) you have no chance to get to a results improvement finish line. But even when the design is perfect, the layout optimal and it all looks beautiful, success can still elude you. The answer turns out to be that a new venue is only part of the recipe that needs to be executed to achieve explosive business growth position.

Strategic Beverage Solutions crisscrosses the country doing Assessments. (Assessment Case Study) This process looks at historical results, interviews management to understand existing practices, and observation to understand the customer and performance improvement opportunities. In almost every situation in which a renovation is being considered, there turns out to be significant other change areas which must evolve in order for the desired business impact result to happen. In order to get to the desired results finish line, comprehensive change must occur in a broader set of areas. It comes down to the scorecard. (Scorecarding Your Hotel Bar Operation)

The comprehensive change effort to support the above situation was huge and needed to all be in effect on Day 1 of the reopen. To the Hotel F&B team, it looked like Mission Impossible. The right next step was a Playbook Plan. (Playbook Programs – Managing Comprehensive Hotel F&B Change ) Comprehensive change was the key to hitting a business improvement home run. The Playbook process organized the tasks, made it look doable, and gave task force resources brought in to help, a roadmap to follow.