Top 7 Secrets of Successful Boutique Hotels

As a boutique hotel owner, you know that a hotel becomes successful not just by its glammy look and bigger size, but rather because it gives a personalized feel and touch to its guests. 

Guests adore such hotels because they offer a classy look, have premium aesthetics, are on the outskirts of urban settings, and provide a luxury feel.   

These hotels are gaining a lot of prominence these days because of their unique style and the personalized experiences they offer to guests.

In this blog, let’s talk about what makes these hotels stand out and the key strategies you should adopt to run a successful boutique hotel business.

What is a Boutique Hotel?

The term “boutique hotel” has different meanings for different hoteliers and their guests.  

For one guest, a boutique hotel is a fashionable place, others may say that it’s different from your standard hotels and premier inns. 

A boutique hotel is present in trendy destinations and focuses on enhancing guest experience.  

Unlike most large hotel chains, boutique hotels are unique in their style, have attractive decor, and provide a personalized experience to guests. 

These small-sized independent properties don’t follow a cookie-cutter approach as they want to cater to a specific clientele and follow a certain theme or design aesthetic. 

A market report states that boutique hotels offer growing potential and transform the guest experience.  

Their demand has increased significantly because guests want premium service, look for immersive experiences and a vibrant space that provides them with cozy settings. 

Many travelers believe these hotels tend to be more expensive, rather these are affordable spaces that are quite small. These hotels have less than 100 guest rooms and are considered more stylish than standard hotels.

How Boutique Hotels are different from others?

Here’s how boutique hotels stand out from others-

1. Location

Often, you see that brand hotels are present near highway areas or where fine dining options are available. 

While boutique hotels are in urban and emerging tourist spots. These hotels exhibit a fashionable setting or neighborhood, give you a local feel, and share a local culture. 

2. Size

The size of boutique hotels is generally smaller, having 25-100 guest rooms available. That doesn’t mean that as these hotels have a small space, they lack amenities. The small-sized hotels focus on providing a quality experience to guests. 

3. Design

These hotels are unique in their design, have individual characteristics, and provide a relaxing experience for guests. They have loads of modern amenities such as lamps, paintings, artistic furnishings, fancy furniture, appealing decor, etc. 

That visual touch creates a memorable experience for guests. 

7 Secret Strategies for Boutique Hotel Management

Running a boutique hotel is neither a cakewalk nor a daunting job. All it requires is you to focus on minute details and following the right tips and strategies can help you ace the game of boutique hotel management. 

1. Your USP counts

Your unique selling proposition is what makes you stand out from others. USP is a key differentiating factor in terms of the services you offer, the chefs you have, the quality of food you provide, or the ambiance people get. 

That makes a BIG difference. In this hyper-competitive world, it’s easy to get your hotel lost in the sea of crowds so you need to craft an effective hotel USP to stay ahead of the curve.  

This USP positions your hotel in the industry. 

2. Be clear about your goals and expectations

To ensure the success of the boutique hotel, you should always have GOALS and expectations. 

For that, you need to have clarity about who your target customers are, what your offerings are, and what unique features you provide to attract the kind of guests you need.  

Moreover, you should be clear about the pain points of your guests, what their expectations are and what’s the reason for traveling. 

Another way is to communicate with your staff and tell them about their expected job roles and responsibilities so they can align with your hotel's vision. 

You can become a top-rated boutique hotel when you train your staff regularly and offer exceptional quality services to guests. 

3. Provide value to your customers

It's not about creating a warm and charming environment for guests.  

As a boutique hotel manager, you need to please your guests either by making your hotel affordable or by providing a luxurious and cozy environment for them. 

Every hotel becomes successful when its customers are highly satisfied with its services. The best way here is to take feedback from them or send out surveys during and after their stay. 

While manually collecting back-and-forth feedback takes most of your time, so you need a guest feedback system to automate the entire feedback process. 

Heda from BOTSHOT sends automatic feedback from guests at any stage of their stay, customizes your survey (short, empathetic, or detailed), and helps you understand what guests feel during their stay. 

This will help you improve your offerings over time. Take some time and read online reviews on third-party sites such as TripAdvisor.  

Engage with them, see whether anyone is dissatisfied with your service, and figure out why people do not like your hotel. 

Address their responses promptly. Thus, it'll enhance the overall guest experience.  

4. Invest in a Property management system (PMS)

You can’t run a successful boutique hotel without investing in a property management system (PMS). 

This online system can manage multiple boutique hotels, simplify your housekeeping processes, and assign rooms automatically to guests. 

Its unified dashboard manages your room availability and prices across various OTAs in real-time. This way, your hotel gets more visibility and hence more sales.

As everything is available at your fingertips, you can ensure that no room gets unoccupied, especially during the peak times or busy season. 

Thus, you can manage the boutique hotel business with ease. 

5. Create an engaging online presence

Your website is the home of hotel bookings. Potential visitors who found your hotel online want to check your website presence.  

If your boutique hotel doesn’t have a website or the website is poorly designed, then don’t expect them to book a stay with you. 

An appealing website design showcases the images of your hotel, talks about the amenities you have, and tells a powerful story and urges your guests to click on CTA “book now”.  

Thus, a solid online presence of a hotel can convert lookers into bookers. 

Apart from creating an SEO-optimized website, build your social media presence on popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.   

A lot of hoteliers are marketing their business on social media to generate BUZZ around their services and get more bookings. 

You can solidify your boutique hotel presence by sharing valuable content, creating short videos, adding social proof, and posting deals or promotions. 

Lastly, solidify your online presence on Google My Business (GMB) as it gives you more visibility when local guests are searching for the term “boutique hotels near me” and your hotel lands on the first go.  

Thus, you can drive more online booking for your hotel business. 

6. Ace your networking game

As a boutique hotel manager, attending networking events or connecting with industry professionals gives you insights into what’s happening in the hospitality industry.  

You can get more brand collaboration opportunities where you can promote your packages to other hotels. 

Be active on LinkedIn and keep an eye on the latest hospitality updates or if a summit is going to happen on a certain day. Connect with like-minded professionals there, collaborate with hotel managers, and make your hotel successful. 

Participating in such networking events gives you more exposure outside, gets you more bookings, and generates a steady flow of income. 

During the networking event, don’t become too pushy in selling your products/services, rather sell an experience and build relationships with others. 

7. Train your hotel staff

You can create a memorable experience for your guests by offering top-notch guest service. That’s truly possible when you make your training curriculum stand out from others.  

A well-trained staff can take the guest's experience to the next level.  

The difference between good and great hotels lies in how well your staff treats your guests. Firstly, make clear to them the vision of running a boutique hotel so they can contribute towards accomplishing that goal. 

Perform role-playing sessions and conduct regular training sessions on various domains such as customer service, problem-solving, communication, empathy, and adaptability. 

Conduct regular interactions with them, share product and service updates (key amenities or packages/promotions) and train them how to become effective leaders. 

The actual growth of your boutique hotel begins when you invest in your staff and when your staff grows individually. That results in increased guest satisfaction and brings positive results for your hotel business.

How Software Enhances Boutique Hotel Operations?

Wondering what makes your boutique hotel successful? Different hoteliers view the success metric from different angles. 

For them, success means a more profitable hotel, for others it means more reputation in the market. For some, it might be a steady flow of cash. 

For you, it might be guest satisfaction.  

How’s that possible?

That’s only possible when you automate administrative tasks, free up your hotel staff, and devote more time to serving your guests. 

How can you do that?

We provide you with an all-in-one hotel management software (hotel in the box) to help you run a successful boutique property. Our cloud-based solution digitizes your hotel business so you can get more direct bookings and turn your hotel into a profitable Bizz. 

Through a single dashboard, you can do the following things-

• Managing your hotel operations becomes easy whizzy.  
• Get more control over your direct bookings.  
• Increase your hotel’s operational efficiency by automating administrative tasks which includes check-in/check-out, manage bookings, room inventory management, etc.  
• Manage your hotel rates on the go. This software considers various factors such as length of stay, week, season, etc.  
• Get more online visibility on different OTAs by integrating PMS with a channel manager.

FAQs

1. How do boutique hotels differ from other hotels?

Unlike big hotel chains, boutique hotels are smaller, elegant, provide comfort to guests, and carry an aesthetic look. 

It offers a unique touch and feel that you won’t find anywhere in the standard hotel chain. 

These hotels have a fancy setup, located in urban settings, and have beautiful designs and decor. 

A popular example of a boutique hotel is Fogo Island, which is on the island of the North Atlantic. It has 29 guest rooms and offers locally sourced food to customers, laundry service, and bicycle rentals. 

2. Which is the best hotel software for small hotels?

BOTSHOT offers the best hotel software for small-sized hotels. Their cloud-based solution helps small hotel managers automate hotel operations, ease their housekeeping tasks, and delight their guests.