Looking After The Box

Lionel Anidjar, Hotel Project Director - Global Asset Solutions

Introducing the series. Every hotel project has moments when a decision is still cheap to change, and each one passes. This six-part series follows a hotel through those moments, from the first drawings to handover, and asks the owner’s question each time: what are we deciding now, and what will it cost the hotel for the next fifteen years?

The view is that of a project director who came from operations and still reads a plan the way a night manager or head housekeeper would. A second thread runs alongside it: every stage is a chance to create something original rather than follow a trend. Each article closes with twelve questions to take into the next owners’ meeting. In order: The Payroll on the Plan, The Locker in the Corridor, The Parquet Under the Bed, The Chair Test, The Last Three Per Cent and The Last Boat. This first article starts at the drawing board.

Article 1 of 6: The Payroll on the Plan

Why operating costs are decided at the drawing board

A hotel plan is best read by following the people, not the finishes.

Where does the guest arrive? Where does the luggage go? How does a waiter reach the terrace? Where do clean linen and dirty linen cross? If those journeys are hard to trace on paper, the team will find them hard in real life, every day, for as long as the hotel trades.

A plan is not just a picture of a building. It is a forecast of the payroll. Every corridor, every level change and every outlet that can't be seen from the next one is a staffing decision, made long before anyone has been hired.

Every corridor on a plan is a line on a future payroll.

The payroll hidden in the plan

A restaurant, a lounge or a pool bar can look superb in isolation. The more useful question is how it connects to everything else. Can one team oversee two areas? Is the service space where it needs to be? Or will extra people be needed simply because nobody can see or reach the next part of the operation?

Here is an illustrative example, not a real project. Put the lobby bar and the lounge on opposite sides of the building, and they may each need their own staff. One extra position covered sixteen hours a day, every day, needs around three and a half full-time employees once days off and holidays are counted. At a fully loaded €45,000 each, that is roughly €160,000 a year. One small mistake, and the hotel's long-term valuation pays for it. That cost was decided the day the plan was drawn. And the worst part is that none of us are strangers to this mistake, whether as guests or as professionals, yet we only recognise it once it can no longer be undone.

This matters more today. In Europe, HOTREC estimates that hospitality is still missing around 10% of its workforce, and HotStats data reviewed by Cushman & Wakefield shows payroll rising faster than revenue. In the Middle East and Asia, the era of filling executive and senior positions with expatriates is long gone, and rightly so. Hotels there compete for local talent like everyone else. Wherever the hotel is, a layout that assumes extra staff will always be available, at yesterday's wages, is built on a bad assumption.

On a luxury project in the Caribbean, we reworked the entire back-of-house arrangement because deliveries, services and circulation didn't follow a logical sequence. We traced what arrived, where it had to go and what happened next. Moving a single activity to the right place improved several connections at once. The result was a coherent operation, and it cost us some redrawing rather than years of wasted effort.

A brief worth designing to

Operational input starts earlier than most people think: at the brief, and even at the choice of designer.

A good brief sets out the guest profile, the capacity, the intended uses and a narrative. The details matter enormously. A restaurant serving breakfast only is a completely different problem from one serving three meals a day. A room for leisure guests is used differently from one where guests expect to work.

The narrative matters too. Guests may never be able to name the story, but they can feel whether a hotel is coherent. For the project team, it becomes the reference point when new ideas arrive. Creative people will keep having ideas. The question is always whether each one strengthens the hotel we set out to build.

Audacity, then reasoning

None of this is an argument for hotels that all look the same. A designer who has never done a hotel is not necessarily a risk. Sometimes that is exactly the point: fresh thinking often comes from people who haven't absorbed the industry's habits.

Once the brief is clear, the designer deserves room to propose. The design and the operation can then develop together. Load every operational restriction on day one and the response tends to be timid, before anyone has seen what was possible.

Trends are the opposite of audacity. By the time a trend reaches a brief, dozens of hotels have already built it, and the ones that opened first will look dated first. The more useful question is what this hotel can offer that no other can, drawn from its place, its building and its story.

Standards are a starting point

An operator's standard is where the discussion begins, not where it ends. It helps to understand the reason behind it, and to check whether the solution still works in this building.

Operations should accept a productive challenge. A new design can genuinely encourage a better way of working. The limit is a permanent burden: something staff will eventually remove, block or work around. When that happens, both the efficiency and the design intent are lost.

We also carry too many requirements from one project to the next without checking whether they worked. A standard repeated across ten hotels is not necessarily a standard anyone reviewed after opening. The lessons from the last opening should shape the next brief, a point the final article returns to.

Decide while it is still a choice

These decisions are collective. The designer, the operator and the owner each carry different responsibilities, and no adviser can simply impose an answer. What an adviser can do is make the consequences clear enough for the owner to decide with open eyes.

Today's tools can produce a convincing image of a lobby within days. They don't show the room service trolley's route at seven in the morning, when every lift is busy. The real test is how the hotel works when every space is full and the team is under pressure.

That is what profitability on the drawing board means: asking the operating questions while the answers are still cheap. The next stage is where the area programme is fixed, and where the spaces guests never see start losing ground to the ones they do.

Questions for your next owners' meeting

1. Has anyone traced guest, staff and goods journeys on the current plans?

2. Which outlets or service points will need their own dedicated staff because of where they sit?

3. Does the brief define the guest profile, meal periods and narrative clearly enough to design to?

4. Which operator standards have been challenged, and which have simply been accepted? 5. What did we learn from the last opening, and is it reflected in this brief?

6. Can the outlets and service points be supervised by fewer people at quiet times?

7. Where do clean and dirty flows cross, and can the plan separate them?

8. Has the operator reviewed the plans before the design scope was fixed?

9. Which staffing assumptions in the budget depend on the current layout?

10. Is the designer free to propose, or has the brief already dictated the answer?

11. What will this hotel offer that exists nowhere else, and is it protected in the brief?

12. Which parts of the concept are borrowed from current trends, and how will they look in ten years?