By Brent Baudier, Vice President, Food & Beverage and Hospitality
Expotel Hospitality
Hospitality food & beverage never really goes out of style, but its popularity is certainly surging back today. According to the National Restaurant Association, sales are up across the board for the industry, which is forecast to reach $1 trillion this year. Additionally, restaurants are expected to hire 200,000 workers in 2024, filling gaps in nearly half of all operators who are suffering from a continued labor shortage.
The issue many properties face today is hotels can no longer afford for F&B to serve as a cost center. By the end of the last business cycle, F&B had reclaimed its place as a desirable, rewarding experience for travelers, only for the clock to reset thanks to COVID. Today, hotels are fighting to reclaim their status as F&B hotspots and choice eateries for a number of reasons, and as a result, it falls on owners to choose F&B options that are compelling and adventurous while also moving the needle on profit.
This isn’t to say that the industry is shying away from passion projects. Passion is vital to F&B success, but having a plan is more important. Business owners today have little to no chance for success without a plan, and it starts from the top down.
This period lends itself to reinvention, and hotels still have the opportunity to benefit from a planned rebirth, embrace new efficiencies, and hit the ground running with the right changes. It’s also the right time to make a change without it looking like a change. Adjusting one’s operating strategy is unlike admitting defeat or acquiescing to failure. Adjusting allows hotels to rebrand and meet the needs of their facility, their guests, and their employees.
Redefine Your F&B
For a long time, the hotel industry has been satisfied with cookie-cutter hotel restaurants, but more is needed for success today. Operators grew attached to these restaurant concepts out of convenience, but guests do not connect with poorly fleshed out concepts and hand-me-down aesthetics. Today, hotel restaurants must clearly stand out from nearby competition, particularly with consumer price sensitivity as significant as it is. This often requires operators to take a different approach while using the same facilities as their peers.
Local influences drive successful hotel F&B. What is driving guests to your location? If it’s food, then hotels must fully assess their competition to understand what makes them unique. In some markets, these elements just jump out at you. People expect crabs in Maryland and barbecue in Texas–that comes with the territory. But most hoteliers must identify what is working in a market, what is missing, and how they can differentiate.
The process of reclassifying one’s local area to fit their business goals is far from simple, but it starts with a robust analysis of your competitors and regional opportunities or limitations. Prioritizing fresh ingredients is always more important than bringing a diverse flavor to an area, and locals often enjoy it when you compliment their palette, not challenge it. Once a hotel restaurant wins over the locals, they’ve begun to cement themselves as a regional delicacy.
Additionally, hotel F&B is an effective means to fill a void in local flavors. If a market is satisfied by high-quality and competitive burger joints, take a beat before considering adding another to the mix. It may be more effective to invest in brick-oven pizza or a Southwestern flavor if that is missing in the local area. Operators must have the freedom and diligence to dig into their personal interests, local drivers, and available opportunities to establish their F&B as a niche within their marketplace.
Service As A Priority
The most significant trend impacting hotel F&B in 2024 has nothing to do with products and everything to do with people. This is the year the hotel industry prioritizes a return to high-quality service–actual service–and the hotels that manage to do so will differentiate themselves from the competition. In fact, hotels have focused on new food, developing innovative F&B concepts and investigating where food comes from, often to the detriment of growing their operations teams.
The pandemic drew many of hotel F&B’s most effective workers to other industries, and it’s up to hoteliers and hotel companies to re-engage with the service component of the business. This means finding reliable people, training them, retaining them, and recognizing them. This is necessary, and hotels will be defined by their success in this arena throughout the current cycle. This requires a cutting-edge approach to training that allows workers to learn at their own pace.
Hoteliers have always hired personalities and trained them to excel in the industry, but this is even more important today. Hotels cannot afford to hire workers without a hospitality mindset. Anyone can learn a menu, but only the best hotel workers will actively seek out ways to improve a guest’s dining experience or take extra steps to mitigate issues in advance. Finding these workers requires more effort in the interviewing and onboarding process to identify a hotel’s ideal candidates.
It’s more important than ever to succeed on the service side of hospitality–the industry can, but it must. Hotel guests who visit F&B are the ultimate captured audience, in that they are sleeping 100 meters from their meal. This is the most opportune moment to offer high-quality service as the first or last experience in a traveler’s day. Meals are often among the most memorable part of anyone’s trip, and to provide the best of the best hotels must ensure workers are operating with lower stress levels, expanded training, and growing confidence.
Attack High Costs
The need to lower costs in hospitality is critical today. According to AHLA, hotels continue to grapple with inflationary pressures, high materials costs, and the rising cost of labor amid an employment crisis. Additionally, hotel rates and the cost of F&B have driven consumers to make more discerning decisions regarding amenities and spending while on the road. As a result, hotels must find ways to control expenses wherever possible, particularly concerning perishables in F&B. If hotels can limit loss behind the scenes in hotel F&B, they can pass these gains on to the rest of the property in kind.
With pressure from high costs closing in from all sides, where can hoteliers look to cut where they haven’t already? The best place to start in the F&B space is with vendor relationships. Hoteliers don’t want to compromise the quality of a meal by choosing inferior ingredients or settling for second best at the purchasing table, but vendors must acknowledge the pressure hotel operators face today. Something many operators lose sight of is the value of a price-shopping exercise. It’s all too easy to fall into a rut as prices balloon across the board and assume there are no fluctuations, but nine times out of 10, these fluctuations take place, and there is wiggle room to negotiate, especially outside of contractual environments. Knowing your vendors are on your side is essential, but it can be challenging to do so without conducting your own research first.
The exercise of investigating different vendors can open operators’ eyes to the available competition and how the industry is changing around them. When conducted quarterly or bi-annually, hotels can have a stronger sense of their place in the hospitality ecosystem, and where opportunities are to slice expenses. Operators should strategize how to speak to vendors in advance and prioritize honesty on both sides of the relationship. This must happen if hotels and vendors are to meet their margins.
Serve the Vision
Hospitality is aspirational, and it always will be. Even at the height of the pandemic, a report from Expedia found consumers still possessed the urge to travel and simply adjusted their purchasing decisions in response to the pandemic. Those who wanted to travel found a way, just as they are today. When our industry weighs the challenges of 2024, it’s essential to remember that in the darkest days of our industry, we were still desirable to consumers.
Hotel F&B must remain as aspirational as the destinations travelers yearn to visit. F&B must return to its roots of high-quality service and attention to detail–of the hotel as the gathering place for locals and visitors alike. Reclaiming this reputation starts with service at the center of its culture, led by passionate workers and driven restaurant staff. It’s sustained by quality ingredients paired with a clearly defined vision shared by both hotel and restaurant leaders. It succeeds based on collaboration between every operator on property, vendors, and partners.
Hotels and hotel F&B can serve the best dish possible through these ingredients: Surprise. This element is often lost in the push to optimize profits, or even survive during the tough months during and directly after the pandemic. However, surprising people is invaluable–it’s the reason we as a species try new things. It’s why anyone travels. And it’s why we are in hospitality in the first place.