Nowadays, when being approached over a hotel project by a potential customer and when asking this potential customer about the kind of clientele s/he envisions for the hotel they are projecting, I am generally confronted with an answer similar to this one: “Well, our hotel should be appealing to couples and families, to leisure and MICE, to Generation Z and to those preceding, to heterosexuals and all those defining themselves with a different sexual mindset.”
If we were to cook up a dish complying to this kind of expectations we probably would end up with a sweet and spicy, sour and salty concoction of crunchy sogginess appalling to the pallet of most. Nevertheless, when talking about hotels we are expected to deliver a project that fits everybody’s needs and expectations.
What we achieve by complying to this kind of lack of focus is what I call conceptual promiscuity. We don’t obtain disagreement of anybody, but we excite nobody. And it’s exactly that excitement, or the lack of it, which converts a hotel into unique and desirable or into a simple commodity.
Our desire to maximize revenue, to stretch rates and occupancies to the ultimate, converge into a compromise of concepts, of authenticity and personality. Our guests’ ultimate expectation, to be excited, to receive the exceptional, to take away memories of a personalized and tailored experience are compromised. To a large extent the hospitality model of Mallorca is based on such compromises, and, except for a few, most hoteliers do sacrifice the potential of their uniqueness for the sake of maximization of profit.
While maximization of profit is doubtlessly a goal worthwhile fighting for, the thing that gets us entrepreneurs excited and out of bed every morning, we defend a balanced model, unable to be simultaneously a perfect fit for every kind of potential clientele. If we focus on family, let’s focus on family. If we focus on gay, let’s focus on gay, if on MICE, let’s be best on MICE. But mixing it all together, without being able to properly attend the specific needs and desires of the different customers, we’d better don’t even start.
Like a chef needs to decide on and perfect a specific cooking style to excel, hoteliers need to do exactly that same thing: perfect a specific style, a specific personality in order to fulfill dreams of a specific type of customer. Other types of customers will come and be happy, however we need to focus on one main segment to excite to be memorable and to be sustainable, conceptually speaking.