What Guests Want From a Hotel Restaurant

Guests who have traveled all day want to get off their feet, and they want to eat while they rest in many cases. Plenty of hotels worldwide have a restaurant inside, and you’ll want to figure out a great deal of details before you embark on securing one.

Does the type of restaurant you envision match the kind of hotel you have? Perhaps people won’t expect a high-quality restaurant in a budget hotel, and that matters where bringing them in the doors is concerned. It’s also true that the perception of a hotel could keep some people out who don’t think they can afford it. Even if the prices aren’t that high, the perception of high prices might keep some of them from eating at a particular place. Consider your customer base and what type of place they might want to frequent if and when they arrive. If you or your executive chef aim to develop one of the best restaurants in the city, that’s a different animal.

Are you willing to open your restaurant to the public? Plenty of restaurants exist inside a hotel, but they take reservations from anyone and everyone who makes the trek to their city. There isn’t anything wrong with that, but you do want to consider how that might impact the volume of customers you get and how you market your restaurant to whatever group you’re targeting. Having an eatery, guests can eat in after a long night of God-knowing what one thing is. Aiming to have an excellent restaurant that people patronize even if they are not staying in your hotel requires much more resources and strategy. Some places even have Michelin stars, but there’s no way to get there and stay there unless you’re willing to exert the necessary resources. You don’t want your quality to fall off, and now you aren’t getting guests from near or far as often.

How do you distinguish the hotel’s branding from that of the restaurant? There’s no reason why a hotel would decline to praise a great restaurant in its midst. It’s worth considering, however, that a restaurant’s aura might overwhelm that of a hotel under the right circumstances. That might not bother the higher-ups where you are, either. There could very well be a scenario where people from around the city and other cities intend to dine at a restaurant that they or others have deemed worth a trip. That’s wonderful, but it almost necessitates the growth of your hotel alongside the place where folks eat. Otherwise, you risk a disconnect that could hurt the branding for both entities.

Once you do an actual study to determine what other eateries are around, you can figure out how well you might be able to compete in the microeconomy. This cuts two ways. Can people find high quality food within a block or two? Do you have possible competitors who might be doing certain things better than your restaurant? Any competitors are aspects of your existence that you must consider if and when you establish a restaurant. If your cuisine is too similar to that of a more-established or older brand, you will have difficulty pulling in folks who more readily identify with the older one.

You should have a feel for what peak hours at your property are. What you’ll want to also figure out is how effective your systems are at figuring out the ways in which guests interact with your facility at large. In other words, you need to figure out how much demand there is for a hotel restaurant. Hotel data should tell you when folks tend to check in, and when they are headed out. If you or a staff member can leverage that data correctly, it should be much easier to understand how you can approach a hotel restaurant and the appropriate hours.