Ten questions we are asked every week

<p>Not with an architect. That is the most common first step — and the most expensive one.</p><p>Start with a market assessment: who comes to this location, how many nights they stay, what they pay today, and who your competitors are. That determines the segment and the key count — and only then does anyone draw a building.</p><p>If the drawing comes before the market knowledge, you will build what <em>you</em> like. A hotel has to be built for the person who will pay for it.</p>

<p>There is no universal number — and be careful with anyone who gives you one.</p><p>The logic is this: a hotel carries costs that barely change with size — reception, security, accounting, a manager, a kitchen. A 15-key property needs a front desk and so does a 60-key one. Those fixed costs are what get spread across the keys.</p><p>So the question is not how many keys are enough, but how many keys this location's demand will fill outside peak season. An oversized hotel ends up discounting, and spoils its own market doing it.</p>

<p>A brand gives you a booking channel, a standard, and trust from day one. In exchange you pay fees, accept strict technical requirements — which push CAPEX up — and give up freedom.</p><p>An independent hotel is more flexible and the margin is higher, but you have to build recognition and a sales channel yourself. That costs both money and time.</p><p>A practical rule: a brand tends to pay off on larger business or resort properties with international demand. On smaller, more distinctive projects, independence is often more profitable — provided the management is professional.</p>

<p>It depends on scale, permits and the financing structure — so a single number would be a dishonest answer.</p><p>What is more useful to know: schedules rarely slip because of construction. They slip because a decision made during design has to be reversed later — the kitchen ended up in the wrong place, a shaft does not fit, the room mix does not match the market.</p><p>Every one of those reversals means redrawing, re-approving, and a crew standing idle.</p>

<p>The industry-standard structure has two parts.</p><p><strong>A base fee</strong> — a percentage of revenue. It covers the day-to-day work of managing the property.</p><p><strong>An incentive fee</strong> — a percentage of gross operating profit (GOP). It applies once the hotel exceeds an agreed performance level.</p><p>The second part matters most to an owner: it ties the operator's income to your profit. If the hotel does not perform, the operator earns less too.</p><p>The actual percentages depend on the project — its scale, segment and the scope of management. That is exactly why we do not publish them.</p>

<p>These are two different businesses, not two design options.</p><p>In a classic hotel the asset is yours and so is the income. In an aparthotel you sell the units — money comes in earlier and construction financing gets easier. In exchange you acquire hundreds of co-owners, each with their own expectations.</p><p>If the legal structure and the revenue-sharing rules are not written precisely at the outset, this becomes the most painful problem later — and one you cannot fix, because the units are already sold.</p>

<p>Often, yes. But the answer is in the drawings, not in the wish.</p><p>Three things decide it: the position of the wet cores, the location of the engineering shafts, and the escape routes. Those three determine whether rooms can realistically be carved out, and what it will cost.</p><p>The harder problem, though, is usually not technical but spatial: the back-of-house — kitchen, laundry, storage, staff entrance. A residential building simply does not allow for them, and without them a hotel cannot operate.</p>

<p>The one made before the concrete and discovered after it.</p><p>The wrong segment, a room mix that does not match demand, a kitchen too far from the restaurant, a staff route that crosses the guest route — all of these are free to fix on a drawing.</p><p>After opening, the same mistake cannot be fixed. It simply charges you every day — in extra wages, wasted energy and lost time. And it keeps charging for ten years.</p>

<p>Three figures decide everything: <strong>ADR</strong> — the average daily rate, <strong>occupancy</strong>, and <strong>GOP</strong> — gross operating profit.</p><p>The first two together give you <strong>RevPAR</strong> — revenue per available room. That is the number that shows a hotel's real position, because a high rate in an empty hotel means nothing.</p><p>A reliable projection exists only when those three numbers are built on real data for the specific location — not on national averages and not on optimism.</p>

<p>Because at opening there is nothing left for them to change.</p><p>An operator involved during design asks the questions an architect does not: where deliveries come in, where waste goes out, where staff change, how many people it takes to clean this floor.</p><p>Those questions are settled in a day on a drawing. In a finished building, the answer becomes a permanent cost you pay for the life of the asset.</p>