Hotel Facilities and Why They Matter

Hotels, like all other businesses, are subject to the whims of the economy, industry, and changes in the local markets. Hospitality and travel trends are constantly shifting, causing hoteliers to adopt new business and marketing strategies constantly. While keeping up with industry trends is integral to staying relevant and competitive, offering a worthwhile and reliable product is the foundation of success. The capabilities properties have to offer—their hotel facilities and amenities—can make or break them, regardless of changes in the market or industry trends.

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In this guide, we’ll cover the ins and outs of hotel facilities as we review the impact they can have on property sales, marketing efforts, and more. You’ll uncover tips, tools, resources, and facility-focused strategies you can use to attract more business and drive hotel revenue. If you’re looking for ways to improve group offers, promote meeting space, or improve the guest experience, you’ve come to the right place.

What are hotel facilities?

A broad and sweeping term, “facilities,” can technically refer to any part of a building or hotel, from the actual structure to the parking lot or guestrooms. However, in this guide, our discussion is more specific; we’re talking about more than the building itself or individual guestrooms. Hotel facilities are designated spaces and utilities designed to facilitate activities. These spaces include, but are not limited to:  

• The lobby
• Check-in/check-out areas
• Food and dining spaces/services
• Hotel bar
• Fitness facilities
• Onsite spa
• Business center
• Meeting rooms
• Swimming pool
• Tennis courts
• Guest lounges
• Outdoor patio

Although “amenities” and ‘facilities” are frequently used synonymously, hotel facilities are distinct spaces and should be categorized separately. Think of it this way: facilities facilitate activities, and amenities improve them. For example, a guestroom can accommodate sleep, relaxation, dining, work, and more. Amenities that will wow your guests and enhance the quality of those activities might include blackout curtains, high-end toiletry products, a separate dining table, or a flexible workstation.

What is hotel facilities management?

Hotel facilities management is a component of hotel operations management focused on the maintenance and upkeep of hotel spaces. Facilities managers determine which facilities a hotel will offer and how they will operate. They work with other departments to ensure all hotel facilities run safely, sustainably, and efficiently.

Optimizing facility performance and perception may require implementing eco-friendly hotel solutions, instituting new technology and software, developing new operating procedures, or hosting staff training. As sustainability initiatives, guest wellness, and forms of hotel technology continue to dominate industry trends, these factors have become essential to hotel facilities management.

The importance of maintaining hotel facilities 

Facilities and amenities make your hotel unique, helping to set it apart from the competition. Guests may review multiple properties when seeking accommodation, looking at online reviews, photos, and written descriptions. If your facilities appeal to potential customers by meeting their needs, they are more likely to book a room at your property than a nearby competitor.

Whether entering the lobby for the first time or coming upon your property listing online, facility presentation can significantly impact how guests perceive your hotel. Presentation and upkeep reflect the care and attention paid to hotel facilities, which consumers may view as a reflection of how well your hotel treats its guests. Attractive, clean, and safe facilities demonstrate that the staff cares for the hotel and its guests.

Optimizing facility management for guest satisfaction

While effectiveness describes how successful an activity or procedure is, efficiency refers to how well something is done, and hotel facilities must have both to provide an optimal guest experience. Work with each department to ensure hotel facilities run in tip-top shape, optimizing facility effectiveness, maximizing efficiency, and improving hotel operations. Schedule routine maintenance to prevent major breakdowns or disruptions, manage the institution of more effective staff procedures and oversee the optimization of each facility’s operational output.  

Guests shouldn’t have to worry about whether their favorite gym equipment is out of order or if the dining room will be too crowded while they try to squeeze in a quick breakfast. Travelers should be able to rely on their hotel to provide all services and experiences as advertised, making their lives easier instead of more complicated.

Ten tips for improving and promoting hotel facilities

Whether you’re seeking property improvement advice, new marketing strategies, or ideas for using hotel facilities to capture more business, you’ll benefit from these tips.

1. Update hotel images

Schedule a photoshoot to capture high-quality, up-to-date images of hotel facilities. Update property photos on all hotel listings and booking sources, such as the main website, social media pages, your Google Business listing, and Cvent venue profile.

2. Provide additional guest benefits with packages and promotions

Create special packages and promotional offers that incorporate the usage of hotel facilities. Combine guestroom and event space rental to build attractive packages that appeal to many different types of hotel guests. Access to event space for three or four hours could benefit a large family with small children as much as a corporate traveler seeking a private room for a teleconference.

Get creative with facility-based packages. Consider opening portions of the hotel patio or dining room to private reservations for parties and intimate gatherings. Create spa, fitness, and meal packages, and capture new local accounts by offering complimentary room nights for every two or three meetings booked. Promote packages and special offers during the online booking process to boost website conversions and maximize revenue potential.

3. Enhance your group offers

Grow group business with facility-based promotions and offers. Look for unique ways to utilize hotel spaces to improve the group stay experience. Consider using hotel facilities to offer groups perks like:
 

• Private dining space
• Meeting space
• Early fitness center access
• A lobby welcome table
• VIP parking or shuttle service
• Personalized decorations
• Early check-in/late check-out exclusives
• Comp promotions (i.e., one complimentary room per 20 booked)

Design exclusive all-inclusive group packages that include comfortable rooms, meeting space, or use of other hotel facilities. Give planners access software that gives groups the power to manage their rooming list. A tools put planners and group contacts in control of their block, freeing up hotel staff to spend more time satisfying guests.

4. Open meeting facilities up to instant bookings

Allow travel and event planners to book simple meetings at your property instantly. Online booking eliminates the need to undergo the RFP process for smaller events. Using pre-set contract terms and conditions, you can streamline event management. Make contracting simple meetings a breeze, and free up the hotel sales team to focus on bigger pieces of business.

5. Cultivate a distinguishable brand identity

A brand identity represents what your hotel is all about: its atmosphere, offerings, and values. Build an identifiable brand that establishes what guests can expect from your property, with a brand identity that makes it easy for consumers to distinguish the hotel’s marketing. Consider the following:

• Is your hotel designed to accommodate budget-conscious or luxury travelers?
• Do you cater to vacationers, corporate guests, or multiple market segments?
• What types of hotel guests do you want to attract?
• Which travelers find the hotel’s facilities most appealing?
• What color scheme, font, and logo capture the hotel’s spirit?

When building your brand, consider the hotel’s facilities and services your property can offer. If your hotel doesn’t have a meeting room or business center, it could be misleading to market the property as the best choice for business travelers or digital nomads. Instead, consider creating a leisure-focused brand by pinpointing what your hotel does have to offer, such as a welcoming lobby and comfortable guestrooms.

6. Create inviting and flexible community spaces

Cultivate welcoming community spaces where guests can work, play, and relax. Look for underutilized areas in the lobby, reception area, business center, or otherwise. Work with your team to unlock the potential of open space, turning unused hotel areas into a game corner, flexible tech-friendly workstations, or a community table. Consider your hotel’s target market, and create communal spaces that cater to your best guests.

7. Use visual storytelling to advertise facilities

While highlighting facility amenities and specific services is critical in communicating important hotel information to guests, consumers are more likely to remember an ad that tells a story than one rooted in facts. Instead of focusing on facility perks alone, create marketing that advertises the guest experience they can offer.

Invite travelers to enjoy spirited summer barbecues on the lush, comfortable outdoor patio or gather for family time in the hotel’s activity center by creating attractive advertisements that feature the same. Use captivating images, add eye-catching colors, and write ad copy that helps the reader see, sense, and imagine what a stay at your hotel would be like.

8. Advertise hotel facilities where planners will see them

Capture more group, transient, and event business by advertising your property. Capture the attention of planners actively sourcing in your area with meeting space banner ads.

9. Take marketing your facilities a step further with a virtual hotel tour

Capitalize on the virtual tourism trend by promoting a virtual tour of your hotel. Through a virtual hotel tour, customers and potential guests can tour the property, exploring the lobby and guestrooms from the comfort of their own homes. Invite prospective groups and potential clients to take the tour so they can see how well-suited the hotel is for their event. Virtual reality marketing allows future guests, travel planners, and event organizers to “try before they buy,” which can help bring them one step closer to booking.

Improve the planner experience with engaging and interactive virtual tools. With event diagramming software, planners, group contacts, and clients can watch their event come to life online. Interactive floorplans enable remote clients to tour event space, walk through their event setup, and view every detail in photorealistic 3D. Using event diagramming software, planners can visualize every aspect of their event—down to the finest detail—and know your property is the right hotel to meet their needs.

10. Do what you do best

Set yourself apart from competing hotels by celebrating what you do differently. Even if your property is a bit older or has fewer amenities than others nearby, you can still win consumers over with guest-focused hotel facilities and marketing that highlights them. Identify what distinguishes your property from competitors and makes it one of a kind.

Frequently asked questions about hotel facilities

1. What are eco-friendly hotel facilities?

Eco-friendly facilities promote sustainability by reducing waste, limiting energy consumption, reserving resources, and participating in other environmentally-friendly objectives. Reducing chemical usage in hotel cleaning procedures, implementing a property-wide recycling infrastructure, and installing automated smart-room technology are just a few eco-friendly initiatives that can help improve facility sustainability.

Learn more about sustainability for hotels

2. What are five-star hotel facilities?

Five-star hotels and luxury accommodations typically offer more services and facility variation than their brand-based or budget-friendly counterparts. In addition to luxurious rooms, five-star hotel guests may encounter one or more onsite restaurants, private swimming pools, rooftop bars, or an opulent spa.

3. How often should hotels renovate their facilities?

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Around the eleven-year mark, most hotels begin to show some wear and tear. Owners and operators should be on the lookout for major renovation needs, such as replacing carpeting, fixtures, or millwork. Focus on the areas that most need updating first, especially communal areas (e.g., lobby, dining room) and revenue-driving spaces (e.g., meeting and event rooms).

When possible, schedule renovations during the off-season to minimize the negative impact on guests and hotel revenue. If finances prevent a complete renovation, revitalize your hotel with small-scale, budget-friendly renovation ideas. Work with the maintenance team to spruce up the hotel by making necessary repairs, updating furniture, or adding a coat of fresh paint. Keeping up with soft renovations can help lengthen the time between major repairs.

You’re ready to maximize the potential of your hotel’s facilities!

With all these facility facts fresh in our minds, let’s jump over to another post and look at their counterpart: hotel amenities. Join us as we explore unexpected guest amenities and discuss how offering them can help hotels exceed expectations. From event passes to activities for the kids, we look at must-have amenities to win guests’ hearts next.

The hotel industry is part of the larger travel and tourism industry.  It is also considered part of the hospitality industry, which includes food and beverage, and other leisure segments.

To give some perspective, the value of the global travel and tourism industry is $5.3 trillion, roughly 7% of the entire global economy. 1 in 10 of all workers, globally, work in the travel and tourism industry, of which the hotel industry is a key part.  So, this is a, shall we say, large industry.  Definitely worth knowing more about if your product or service could be a fit.

Overview

And hotels are part of this larger travel and tourism industry.  The size of the global hotel industry is $550 billion.  And the size of the U.S. hotel industry is $218 billion.  That’s almost double from just 15 years ago.

Since the 2008 recession, as the economy recovered, the hotel industry has grown tremendously.  As business activity resumed, business travel increased and consumer travel rebounded quickly as well.

So, this is a very large and attractive market for many supporting and supplier industries. This ranges from everything from real estate and finance, to room design and furnishings, to payroll software, to food and beverages and many other related industries.

How the Hotel Industry is Structured

There are 3 main aspects of hotels; brands, owners, operators.  Read more about the hotel industry structure here.

Hotel Brands

Hotel brands are the names we all know; Marriott, Hilton, Wyndham, Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn and the like. These brand companies usually don’t operate their own hotels, but franchise their brand to hotel owners.  Brands set the standards of the hotel chain and control the consistency and quality of the guest experience.  They also offer booking platforms, and loyalty programs and the like, to encourage brand loyalty. 

The top global hotel brands by economic size are Marriott, Hilton, Best Western, Hyatt, Accor, Intercontinental, Wyndham and Choice hotels.

Owners

Owners are often a different entity from the brand or operator of a hotel. Real estate investment groups or real estate investment trusts (REITS) pool investor money to buy hotel real estate assets; namely the land and buildings.  These owners usually then franchise a hotel brand, sometimes known as flags, to operate the hotel under.  And while they may operate the hotel themselves, many owners hire a third-party management company to operate the hotel.

Operators

Operators, although sometimes the same organization as the owners, are more often hotel management companies.  Owners of hotel real estate, hire these hotel management companies, that operate a number of hotels, often under different hotel brand names.  These operators, or management companies exist to optimize profits, through operational expertise. And because they run many hotels, they offer better buying power for various operating systems.

Selling to the Hotel Industry

There are many types of business products and services that support the 3 aspects of the hotel industry structure; brands, owners and operators.  Just one example, is the fact that on average, hotels re-decorate their hotel interiors and rooms every seven years. So just the interior design and furnishings supplier industry for hotels is huge. But for a variety of business goods and services, the hotel industry is a large and growing market.

Trade Associations

Two key hotel industry associations are the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) and the

Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA).  As of 2018, AAHOA has approximately 18,000 members who own about half the hotels in the United States.

Tradeshows & Conferences

Here are some of the key hotel tradeshows and conferences, most of them in the U.S.  As the hotel industry is global, there are many additional hotel-related conferences and trade-shows around the world, focusing on different regions, like Asia.  But these are the main U.S. events, most of which happen annually.

• Hotel Experience  (HX)
• Boutique Design  (BD) This event has a New York show and a separate West Coast show, every year.
• AAHOA Annual Conference
• AHLA Conference
• IMEX America
• The Lodging Conference
• The Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition and Conference (HITEC)
• Hunter Hotel Investment Conference
• The Americas Lodging and Investment Summit (ALIS)

See a more complete list of hotel industry events here.

Hotel Industry Media

These are the main hotel industry publications:

• Hotelier Magazine – this is produced by the AAHOA
• Lodging magazine – produced by the American Hotel & Lodging Association
• Hotel Business magazine
• Hotels magazine
• Hotel Management

Food and Beverage

The food and beverage (F & B) aspect of the hotel industry is enormous.  Hotels are increasingly competing by offering improved food and beverage products and experiences.  Just about all hotels offer either a paid or complimentary breakfast.  More upscale hotels offer room service.  And most medium to upper tier hotels have a restaurant and bar on premise. 

The more upscale the hotel, the more important providing a quality food and beverage experience to guests is, as guests are staying there for the experience. More upscale hotels, with the possible exception of those located in areas where there is a large concentration of restaurants, will offer high quality food and beverage options.  As well as room service.

If you have a food and beverage product or other hospitality product or service, most hotel management companies will have a director of food and beverages, so these are the key people to reach.  And hotel brands will also have food and beverage decision-makers who are responsible to maintain the food standards of their franchisees. Other players involved are

Group Procurement Organizations (GPO’s), such as Avendra, were created to aggregate purchasing power for multiple hotel groups and negotiate with suppliers on behalf of hotel groups.  Avendra was actually founded by the Marriott hotel group in 2001 and was co-owned by other hotel brands like Hyatt and Intercontinental before being sold to Aramark in 2017. 

Foodservice Distributors

If you are selling a F & B product to hotels, you will most likely need to also work through a foodservice distributor. Large, national foodservice distributors like U.S. Foods and Sysco and also smaller, regional ones, are the businesses that hotels buy from.  Your product will likely need to be ‘in-distribution’ for hotels to purchase them.  This means that in most cases, you will also need to sell to these foodservice distributors that hotels use, in order for you to sell to hotels.

To learn more about foodservice distribution, read our e-book ‘Let’s Do Lunch’.

Hotel Retail

Retail is an important aspect of many hotels, especially resort hotels and mid to upper tier hotels. These range from a simple food pantry with snacks and beverages, to a larger gift shop with a wider range of products.  As in food and beverages, selling to these shops will also require understanding and selling to the distributors of your product category.

Design and Furnishings

Hotels are in the experience business, not merely the lodging business.  The more upscale the hotel, the more this is true.  And a large component of delivering a pleasurable and memorable experience to their guests is the interior design, furnishings and lighting of the hotel.  Hotels on average, re-furbish and redecorate their interiors roughly every 7 years.  Hotels have to stay current and have the latest styling, décor, lighting and finishes, to maintain their brand and their ability to charge optimal room rates.  Therefore, there is a very large supplier industry to hotels, covering all aspects of interior design and furnishings.  

The main U.S. tradeshows covering this aspect are the Boutique Design New York show and the Boutique Design West shows.

A key international show for this aspect is the Shanghai International Hospitality Design & Supplies Expo.

Conclusion

There you have it; I hope this blog was an interesting and useful primer on the hotel industry. This is a large and growing market and is an attractive candidate for many products and services.  And by the way, we help companies like yours reach this market by providing consulting and marketing services, so, if you’d like to have a free introductory phone to explore how we could help, call us.

Thanks for reading.

Further Reading:
‘Global Hospitality Insights’ white paper by Ernst & Young

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