How you can bring the hospitality project to life from day one!

Who can help in bringing the hospitality project to life from day one? Is it the management company or the owner? Do you see the designer or developer involved? These are all coming to the mind when you see the start of operation of a new Hotel or any hospitality project. Is the marketing and Sales get the highest share of responsibility in getting the project running from day one. How does the project phases affecting the operation part.

I would like to start from the beginning of the project. The reality is that there is always missing parts from the project phases which is always leading to the delay of start and the slow acceleration of the project incomes. As usual the start of any project should come after a full visibility study which is usually done by financial experts. In the start of the project they don’t see any need to consult someone who knows about hospitality management. However this should be part from the early studies as well as to include the survey of the location of the project. Full study then required to be investigating the competitors in the location in all aspects of their strengths and weaknesses. This study is crucial to be done before the design phase and also before the financial studies. As the design will take in consideration the requirements of the location and the comp set capabilities. This should be merged with a good design options to get the best project to avoid the competition and go directly to the blue ocean leave all the comp set in their red ocean activities. As example to that when you are building a project where your comp set have a certain capabilities for banquet facilities with limited capacity to accommodate 500 max. Then you start to build the project with a banquet capacity of 1000 to attract the customers who cannot get from the comp set the same product. Then you drive the market in this capacity. Same for the F&B you should study the comp set what they have and which cuisine is available in their restaurants. The best is to get the higher category of the F&B either by choosing upscale different cuisine or similar but above the level of the comp set. This also is including the services. If there is a combination of night life activities in the surrounding location this could be beneficial to create something different for that gaining from the nearby location but advance in the product which means offers different products and excel in that. On top of that what is the rooms, suites and apartment products the comp set have. Then what will make you on the top of all. All of the study should be including not only what is not available with the others but also what can be needed in that market.

All of the above studies should be done before the feasibility study of the project. Also these studies should drive the design phase to get the suitable design to serve the final product which is needed to meet the requirements of getting the elements to swim alone at the blue ocean. The design needs to be out of competition including the best systems and products which is the latest in the market and the best for the functionality of it. As you don’t need to get the latest invention if it will not be functional for the majority of the users. So the formula here is to get the best functional and superb products and systems. All the design phase needs to be controlled by experienced operations expertise to get the best out of the designers and to get the best functional products. Additional to that the infrastructure of any project should be always getting the focus and avoid any shortcuts as these are very risky and will get the bad implications in the future when you have to rectify later with a lot of associated costs ( usually higher than any initial savings ).

The next part is the project execution phase which needs a control measures in place to avoid the unnecessary mistakes which always highly impact in the time and the cost of the project and also can affect the final quality of the project. The most important is to get the project management in place by professionals. As a lot of owners think they can do it themselves by getting contractors and hiring them directly and they may feel they can visit and follow up all the stages of the project. This is one of the vital mistakes as the project management is not site visits or approvals of samples. The project management is full structured team following up the project to be as per the design and specifications and the deliveries of the project should be on time and at the approved cost. If there is no project management in place the cost of the project will be jump higher and the time frame will be not controlled with a lot of repeated mistakes.

At the end if the project is getting all the above points in place do you think your operation team including the sales and marketing will be able to sell that product. Are they will be within the comp set limits? Do they get the advantages to be on the tip top of the competition?

I think that the project development if it is engineered it will drive the sales and marketing out of the competition