How to Start a Boutique Hotel
Have you ever lodge in a boutique hotel before? And you probably noticed it was different from the regular hotel you lodge in, well that’s because it is. Thus, before venturing into this business, it would be in your favor to know all about the business first.
What is a Boutique Hotel?
A boutique hotel is a hotel with below 100 rooms, personalized service, and dashing aesthetics. Generally, it is not defined by a particular category of hotels, but its characteristics characterize a boutique hotel.
Even though boutique hotels are smaller than traditional hotels, at these unusual but striking getaways, customers do not think there is any lack of facilities and services.
Features of Boutique Hotels
If you intend to build your boutique hotel, here are a couple of things you should include in your business plans.
- Upscale Design: Normally, the exterior of a boutique hotel is strikingly unusual and historical, or classic and contemporary.
- Personalized decoration:As a result of the trending aesthetic, all boutique hotels are uniquely designed with outdoor decor that gives the atmosphere a charming personality. Your boutique shouldn’t be found wanting in this area.
- Stylish Restaurants:It is popularly known that you’ll be greeted by the aroma of fresh meals made locally when you enter a bar or restaurant in a boutique hotel. This is something your boutique hotel should have.
- Personalized service:Whenever guests lodge in a boutique hotel, they are always looking forward to customized toiletries and personalized facilities. At times upon entering, they might even be greeted by their name.
- Local Culture:Boutique hotels usually help their guests adjust to the local culture regardless of where they find themselves in any part of the world.
Hence, customers might be offered local artworks, free bicycles, or some booklets to shed more light on the town’s secrets. This would make them feel free and relaxed. It would be as if they’ve been there earlier.
Differences between a regular hotel and a boutique hotel
Although they’re both hotels, a boutique hotel is not entirely like a regular hotel.
The difference between them is in the experience of the customers. Nevertheless, you might think that this is something everybody can do; however, if you want to succeed, you have to meet the specified process and standard.
The most remarkable difference is that unlike regular hotels, two boutique hotels are never the same.
Aside from it being usually smaller than the regular hotels, many other features distinguish a boutique hotel from several different hotels worldwide.
All the characteristics that make boutique hotels unique and different from the others have been summarized below:
Boutique Hotels
- It is centered on giving guests a sense of privacy and intimacy.
- The number of rooms ranges from one to a hundred.
- Often Incorporate latest trends
- Employ few workers because of the size of the hotel
- Provide freer services such as bottled water and snacks
- Every room is furnished uniquely, with distinct themes
Regular Hotels
- The number of rooms ranges from one hundred to one thousand, and there are cases they are more than this.
- Mainly focused on offering maximum comfort.
- Recruit as many workers needed to check on their customers and perform domestic tasks
- There are bills for any refreshments and meal served.
- Provides extra luxuries, such as pools and steam baths
- Develops a one-size-fits-all decor strategy
What helps to make a “Perfect” boutique hotel?
Many hotels in big cities and towns worldwide have started taking a unique approach to offering night accommodation.
Here’s a rundown of what you need to stick out from other boutique hotels and appear the best among them.
- The luxurious interior of your boutique hotel.
- Classy lounge/bar area
- Classic Spa or salon
- Luxurious interior with a homely atmosphere
- Personalized and customized services
- Free Breakfast
- Pet friendly
- Unique group activity such as yoga lessons or wildlife hikes
Boutique Hotel Inspiration
If you are hoping to establish your boutique hotel and you need some motivation on how to get it right, below is a compilation of few popularly-known boutique hotels across the U.S. that could be of help.
- Ocean House – Watch Hill, RI
- The Jefferson – Washington DC
- The Little Nell – Aspen, CO
- The Canyon Suites at The Phoenician – Scottsdale, AZ
- Solage – Calistoga, CA
How to Start a Boutique Hotel
The boutique hotel has presented new opportunity investors to luxury hotels without spending large amounts of money. This being isn’t implying that individuals can’t invest in the hotel business in little ways. However, the boutique hotel offers innovative ways to start and attract the best kind of paying potential customers.
You can commence your own boutique hotel business in your preferred city. Just as you can invest in real estate assets, you could even establish friendly boutique hotels in your preferred location and receive massive incomes, unlike renting apartments, condos, and duplexes.
Rather than constructing three-bedroom apartments and leasing them for annual rent, one could build a boutique hotel and lease the rooms regularly with a large percentage of profits compared to that gotten from the apartments.
You can recover the investment in the shortest period. It’s also the safest way to invest in real estate while getting a reasonable profit on your investment.
You can also transform and redecorate a new property into a nice hotel. Try visualizing a story that can be changed into ten or even more rooms hotel in a Highbrow neighborhood with four flats. That would be fantastic, wouldn’t it?
Boutique hotels are a growing trend in real estate. They aren’t only more accessible in building them, but they’re also lucrative to run. You would need fewer human resources to manage a twenty room hotel. That also entails smaller salaries and lower expenses. However, this doesn’t mean that boutique hotels are in an inexpensive choice of hotels.
Many boutique hotels are designed to attract high-end guests who need a little privacy and luxury service, which is typically offered by only big brand five-star hotels.
Qualities of a Boutique hotel
The main features to incorporate are in designing your boutique hotel here. However, the best approach is using the help of a hotel design specialist. Having one of them is your most significant investment.
- Size is the main factor
- Individuality is of great importance
- Style is at the heart of its beauty.
- Character is the decoration of style
- Location is crucial to your success
- Culture is in its humor.
- Service is its person
- Local food is paramount
- Customers are important
These nine features are what define great boutique hotels. It would be best if you concentrated on providing these main features in your boutique hotel. You should sustain a minimum of ten rooms and a maximum of a hundred in terms of size. Even so, 10 to 20 rooms are on the budget side.
The best boutique hotel is one that focuses on providing individual experiences according to every guest’s preferences. This includes Various styles, decorations, colors, and even facilities.
- Starting Costs of a Luxury Hotel
After reading through this insightful article, the most relevant question should be how much it would cost to establish a boutique hotel.
However, there is no precise answer to that, although we may discuss alternatives to reach a projected cost.
Since no two boutique hotels are alike, so the costs can not be standardized. There are many factors to consider while designing a boutique hotel.
Factors such as :
- Cost of land
- Construction or renovation expenses
- Cost of labor in the city
- Cost of permits by the Government
- Some small or miscellaneous expenses
These variables may be used to determine the exact cost of starting a hotel. Therefore giving an estimated cost without considering these factors would be wildly inaccurate as this also depends on your target city. Your prototype design costs should include the charges of a site survey, a space management plan, a great design blueprint, and an overall cost estimate. And the estimated values should also include the cost of materials and labor costs.
By doing this, you will have a precise value of all that it would take you to create the boutique hotel of your dreams.
Action Refers to the Luxury Hotel Style.
Specific predefined measures must accompany your vision of starting a hotel. You can decide to have many luxurious rooms, but don’t forget that boutique hotels usually don’t have many places. Besides that, there’s no need to have a surplus of rooms.
Second, your location should portray a brand image that it’s not just a regular hotel.
Let’s look at some of the essential steps you have taken to plan, build, and decorate your boutique hotels.
Step One: Boutique Hotel Plan
The first step in starting a boutique hotel is in the planning stages. While having a business plan is a vital part of starting any company, it is far more important for hotels.
Before setting up a boutique hotel in any area, it is vital to have a proper feasibility study. Note that location is one of the hallmarks of the boutique hotels. And put your all into this when searching for a venue. Get the right contractor to carry out this task.
Don’t get worried about the cost involved, because if you miss it in your location, you’ve likely missed it in its totality. If it costs a fortune to carry out the definitive feasibility study, don’t compromise for less.
A feasibility study is not only a report, and it is a detailed investigation of the efficacy of a company at a particular venue.
Step Two: Select the most suitable location
That leads us back to the point, which is the location. When it comes to boutique hotels, there is no alternative to the venue. Either you have a suitable spot, or you don’t even consider going into this business.
There’s no mystery in seeking a location. In other words, there is no technicality associated, as well. It’s better to let the professionals do their job of getting an ideal place for you than to make a huge mistake you’ll end up regretting.
Step Three: Finding a construction and design company
When it comes to picking a design and construction agency, this could either make your dream come true or the opposite when your choice is wrong.
It would be best if you also remembered that the boutique hotel business is a luxury business.
And you can never subtitle the feeling of luxury, the only luxury can feel like a luxury.
Once guests don’t get that joy of luxury in your boutique hotel, you’ve missed the point. Seriously, your business is now marked to fail.
The use of a professional hotel designer and construction company to develop your hotel business can not be underestimated. It’s either the best thing or nothing at all. You shouldn’t hire any random construction engineer, hire experts.
If you have no clue how to select the perfect agency to build your hotel, you can get help from other boutique hotels you admire.
Step Four: Top-Notch Interior Design & Luxurious Facilities
Finishing is a beautiful art. Something will seem to appear flawless until its beauty is time-tested. Deceptive beauty is vanishing. Luxury beauty is a standard of boutique hotels.
It’s got to be top class to qualify as a luxury. Any designer may pretend to provide luxurious decoration, but looking like and being luxury itself are two different things.
Even if nothing lasts forever, luxury has a way of maintaining its elegance forever, with only a little care, luxury will glow forever.
Step 5: Recruitment and Unique Marketing Campaign
Culture is in the heart of a boutique hotel. Your hotel business can be characterized by the individuals you employ to work for you and your marketing strategy. Build the right hotel culture from the start and continue with it. You will also need to recruit highly experienced staff members.
Depending on the number of rooms, employ enough staff to minimize the waiting period, and provide customers with customized services.
Now that you’ve chosen to start your boutique hotel, you ought to figure out what you need to do and how to do it.
You can’t merely employ a construction engineer to build a boutique hotel. The core concept of a boutique hotel isn’t just a beautiful design. There are the uniqueness, history, and personality of the building itself.
Hire a skilled and experienced hotel consultant who can offer you the real touch and quality you need. But all of these factors definitely won’t go without the location, the decoration, and the innovative architecture of boutique hotels.
All starts right from planning, place, design, construction, decoration to management style. If it doesn’t meet the standard, it might be a hotel, but it certainly isn’t a boutique hotel.
How to make your boutique hotel business profitable in 90 days
We understand that running a small hotel isn’t easy. Hoteliers are overworked and time-poor, and despite how beautiful your hotel or how impeccable your service, you still find yourself struggling to keep the ship above the sea. The exceptional experience your hotel has to offer deserves to be more profitable. Here are our tips to make your property more profitable.
- Cut time wastage – how to make a profit with the hotel business.
You can face problems managing time. We know what you think is what you need to spend time on, right? True, but that doesn’t mean there’s no more effective way to do stuff. If you are still documenting your bookings with paper and pen, consider using a property management system. It will save you time and reduce all non – value Administrative Work.
A successful PMS will be so easy to use; it takes very little time to train workers. The next thing is to get tools to incorporate, such as a booking channel manager, payment gateway, and accounting applications into your PMS. All this will minimize the time you spend managing the various tasks involved in running your hotel.
- Delight Your Guests
Make your hotel more prosperous by upselling your guests. Maybe you’ve tried this before, and it didn’t work, or perhaps you’re scared of being pushy. The truth is that, if you do it correctly, the upselling won’t seem like upselling at all.
Ask a family of guests if they know the larger room, they might not have found it through their booking site, or after a long drive with kids, they may have changed their minds about their space size.
Ask your newlyweds for honeymooning if they would like the room with a view over the bay, and this may have been taken at the time of booking but vacated by guests who have canceled their stay.
Offer reduced rates for more extended stays – the discount could attract guests already considering extending their stay. The point is if you personalize and take into account the best interests of the customers and upsell is not an upsell. It would seem like you are trying only to boost their overall hotel experience.
- Broaden Your Reach
Maximize your booking channels to the best you can afford. This includes significant booking sites such as TripAdvisor and Booking.com, thus ensuring commission prices are not cut to the bottom line.
These massive booking sites would advertise your small hotel to a vast global audience that you can not ignore. Use the tools of a channel manager to ensure you don’t get double bookings across these different channels and keep your prices the same across all channels.
You’ll want to advertise your hotel on free websites, too. For example, in New Zealand, there are 100 percent Pure New Zealand and Spice Touch, both suitable for luxury hotels and bread and breakfasts.
- Market To Your Network
You’ll also want to advertise your hotel in ways that don’t charge fees if you want a genuinely good hotel. Past guests are a great way to reach new customers without a commission. They will have the best marketing dollars they can’t buy: word of mouth endorsements, enjoying their stay in your beautiful hotel. Place past guests on your mailing list, and stay in contact with exclusive deals, updates, or upcoming event information.
Please encourage them to pass on these to family and friends. Other commission-free marketing opportunities include partnerships with other businesses in the area, such as restaurants, theaters, and festivals – they will pass on their customers to you. Eventually, get your hotel on social media. Facebook and Instagram are ideal for the promotion of your property.
- Make Direct Bookings Very Easy
There is one secret method that all good boutique hotels use to increase their revenue: direct bookings through their website.
These direct bookings are ideal as they are free to commission. Most hotel bookings are now available online via mobile devices, so a website that is not attractive, readable, and mobile compatible will cause many potential customers to click away.
Invest in creating a beautiful and easy-to-use website that matches your hotel and ensures that it is mobile. Make sure you use a booking engine that integrates with your PMS for smooth and seamless bookings to make your beautiful hotel thrive.
6 Secrets Of Managing A Successful Boutique Hotel
The opening of a massive hotel with hundreds of rooms and all the best facilities could be out of the question. It’s going to take a lot more cash start-ups, resources, and experience to get going. But what about a little boutique hotel or an inn? Something about personality and style?
A smaller space gives you a chance to offer your guests something different and meet their needs fully, helping them every day? You could do this. Here are some tips to help you make your boutique hotel a success.
- Learn and understand the process of running an adequate boutique hotel
- Considering your demographics, you should cater to a wide range of audiences.
- Seek to offer more services. This is where you have to become creative and innovative in your product offering.
- Be sure to pay close attention to your overall decor.
- Identify your USP, find that thing that makes you a lot different from other hotels, and capitalize on it.
Conclusion
Starting your boutique hotel from scratch could prove to be somewhat tricky and challenging, especially if you are new to this business line. Nevertheless, with this short guide, you can get yourself started on a trajectory to success.