BERLIN — Hotels don't have to just be about putting heads in beds. Increasingly, hotel investors and operators are looking at ways to tie the hotel experience to complimentary brands and services — including high-end wellness and coworking — to maximize the value of their assets.
During the "Everything Everywhere All at Once: The Great Merger of Hospitality Concepts" session at the Adjacent Spaces event, Elena Ladisova, vice president of Brookfield Asset Management, said it all comes down to "finding creative ways to enhance real estate asset value."
"What we've seen in relation to our assets is really a push to quality over price and experiences over belongings as the things driving people's decisions," she said.
Shafi Syed, global head of hotel development and acquisitions for Equinox Hotels, said his company's approach to both high-end health clubs and hospitality open up different streams of demand.
"It's really a delicate balance of different real estate asset classes and each user group," he said.
Equinox Hotels currently has one operating hotel — in New York's Hudson Yards development — and Syed said the company views hotel guests and gym members as distinct groups that must be catered to but also can provide elevated value for each other and the business. That's further elevated by carving out a space in a large mixed-use development such as Hudson Yards.
"You have every asset class within that building, and they all coexist," he said.
Syed said the health club provides a natural connection between the hotel and the community because locals are coming in to work out three or four times a week, and guests are treated like members during their stay.
"They're coming in and spreading out into hotel spaces, and the hotel guests like that," he said.
He said there need to be reasons for different asset types to interact "rather than trying to shoehorn" a restaurant or bar into a hotel space.
Syed said non-hotel brands increasingly are carving out spaces within the hotel industry because of the strength of their brand followings, which allows for different combinations in a single piece of real estate.
"Look at two examples, Bulgari and Nobu, they come out of very different core businesses then having turned to hotels," he said. "I think people recognize instantly what they bring to the table."
Similarly, Michael Struck, CEO, managing director and founder of Ruby Hotels, said success can hing on having a specific type of traveler and stay occasion in mind that relates to other real estate asset classes.
Ruby Hotels was designed from the beginning to capitalize on a growth in coworking and remote work. Designing operations to maximize that can elevate a property over a typical mixed-use asset.
"Mixed-use obviously gives your portfolio the benefit of having various business profiles, while some are more cyclical and others are less," Struck said. "But we see manager synergies of having one operator of hotel and workspaces."
Struck said the benefits include having a combined sales force for each of the different business avenues and sharing communal spaces. He added if the concepts are pulled off well and in unison, the guest or consumer benefit "becomes much stronger."
"In our case, the workspace members love the fact that they're around hotel guests and are constantly refreshed by a pool of like-minded people that they can be around in the public areas like the cafe or the bar," he said.
Another hotel concept built around remote work — with an emphasis on extended stay — is Pied-a-Terre by Ace Hotel. Principal Trey Shores said the concept is similar in delivery to serviced apartments and a "work-from-anywhere brand."
He said Ace Hotels is better known for the vibrancy of its public spaces rather than being designed for the needs of extended-stay travelers, but those things can work in concert to elevate the guest experience.
Shores said each asset is unique, and the burgeoning brand is still figuring out how much of a property must be geared for long stays versus traditional, shorter hotel stays.
"It really is driven by the real estate," he said. "Everybody in this room knows extended-stay benefits from higher [gross operating profit] margins, better staff retention and fewer staff."
While much of the discussion revolved around bringing non-hotel offerings into the hotel space, Ladisova said there will be some opportunities going the other direction, specifically citing "the hotelization of offices."
"That's another trend we're seeing in the world where people are still a little bit reluctant to come back to the office," she said. "We see increased amount of amenities as employers are trying to bring people back."