Are European Hotel Restaurants Problematic or Instrumental in Creating Value
Are European hotel restaurants problematic or instrumental in creating value?
In Western Europe the majority of the hoteliers and other stakeholders involved with them agree that hotel restaurants are a liability because of the very low profit margins and the difficulty of making a return on investment. This is without even mentioning all the operational problems inherent to this type of activity. It is true that in Europe hotel restaurants are subject to the same constraints as other restaurants which most resemble the Lernean Hydra. Each independent hotel, or hotel chain, tries to find its own solutions. For this reason numerous consultants offer innovative solutions, which are more or less ephemeral, and which generally concern the concepts’ design and atmosphere; elements which cannot provide any more a competitive edge and which have become indispensable. North American hotel restaurants show the same issue. The solutions provided by US hotel chains, such as sub-contracting to national restaurant chains or creating their own restaurant brands, are only partially applicable in Europe due to the differences in market structure and the cultural diversity of customers in European hotel restaurants.
The goal of this article is not to propose specific innovative hotel restaurant concepts, each one being more extreme than the last, but rather to stimulate hotel stakeholders to analyse their own situation and reflect on their individual objectives for opening a restaurant in their hotel or continuing to operate a restaurant in their hotel but with needed modifications for their main targets. It is only then that they will be competent to evaluate their strategic choices and decide on an appropriate approach to creating value for the customers and for the company.
The first part of this article deals with the identification and analysis of strategic solutions applied by a large European hotel chain. The second part provides a short comparison
In Western Europe the majority of the hoteliers and other stakeholders involved with them agree that hotel restaurants are a liability because of the very low profit margins and the difficulty of making a return on investment. This is without even mentioning all the operational problems inherent to this type of activity. It is true that in Europe hotel restaurants are subject to the same constraints as other restaurants which most resemble the Lernean Hydra. Each independent hotel, or hotel chain, tries to find its own solutions. For this reason numerous consultants offer innovative solutions, which are more or less ephemeral, and which generally concern the concepts’ design and atmosphere; elements which cannot provide any more a competitive edge and which have become indispensable. North American hotel restaurants show the same issue. The solutions provided by US hotel chains, such as sub-contracting to national restaurant chains or creating their own restaurant brands, are only partially applicable in Europe due to the differences in market structure and the cultural diversity of customers in European hotel restaurants.
The goal of this article is not to propose specific innovative hotel restaurant concepts, each one being more extreme than the last, but rather to stimulate hotel stakeholders to analyse their own situation and reflect on their individual objectives for opening a restaurant in their hotel or continuing to operate a restaurant in their hotel but with needed modifications for their main targets. It is only then that they will be competent to evaluate their strategic choices and decide on an appropriate approach to creating value for the customers and for the company.
The first part of this article deals with the identification and analysis of strategic solutions applied by a large European hotel chain. The second part provides a short comparison