Refurbishing a hotel while it keeps selling rooms

Every room a hotel takes off sale for a refurbishment is a night's revenue it never gets back. That is where every conversation with a hotel operator starts, and it should shape how the job is planned, priced and run.

We've worked in hotels that kept selling rooms throughout, and the general principles of working around a business that cannot close all apply. A hotel has a few problems of its own, though, and they're worth understanding before you ask anyone for a price.

Taking rooms out in blocks

Rooms come out in blocks, not one at a time scattered around the building. A block can be worked, protected, inspected and handed back as one, which is quicker and quieter than chasing single rooms from floor to floor.

How the blocks are drawn depends on the scope. If the job is decoration, carpets and furniture, a corridor or a floor at a time usually works. If the bathrooms are being redone, the building decides for you. In many hotels the en-suites are stacked one above another and share the same drainage and water risers, so isolating a riser can take every room on that stack out of use, on every floor.

Then there are the rooms next to the work. A room above a bathroom being stripped out may be technically available, but nobody will enjoy staying in it. Whether those rooms come off sale or are sold with a warning is the hotel's decision. It needs making with the programme in front of the revenue team, not on the morning.

The handback date for each block has to be one you can trust, because those rooms will be sold the moment they're back. I'd always build and sign off a sample room first. It finds the problems once, rather than in every room in the hotel.

Noise runs the other way round

In an office or a shop, noisy work goes out of hours. In a hotel, out of hours is when the building is full and people are asleep. The workable window is the middle of the day, between checkout and check-in, when most guests are out.

Even then, not every guest is out. Shift workers, people with jet lag, families with small children, last night's wedding party. Breaking out tiles and core drilling carry through a concrete frame much further than you would think. So the front desk needs to know each morning which work is noisy and where, so they can put guests well away from it.

In a hotel the night is the one time you can't make noise. Everything noisy has to fit between checkout and check-in.

Guests and builders don't share a corridor

A guest's stay shouldn't include watching builders go past, if it can be helped. That means a separate route in and out for the works: a back-of-house entrance, a service lift or a protected stair, and nothing carried through reception. Where a corridor has to be shared, it's split with a clean, decorated hoarding and the carpet is protected.

Operatives need briefing on how to behave in a building full of guests, with their welfare facilities back of house. Access to guest floors and rooms is controlled by the hotel, not by us.

Hotels are sleeping accommodation, so fire safety during the works matters more than almost anywhere. Escape routes stay clear and protected, bedroom and corridor fire doors stay closed and working, and any detector isolations are done under permit and reinstated before the end of the shift.

Back of house is where the hotel actually runs

Kitchens, laundries, plant rooms and staff areas are the parts guests never see. They're often in the worst condition, and the hotel can't trade without them.

A kitchen refurbishment needs a plan for how food gets served while it is out of action, whether that's a temporary kitchen, a reduced menu or a banqueting kitchen elsewhere in the building. That is the operator's call, but the programme has to be built around it. There's more on the kitchen side in what drives the cost of a bar and restaurant fit-out.

Plant shutdowns are the other big one. Turning off hot water or heating to connect new pipework affects every occupied room on that system, so shutdowns are planned for the quietest periods in the hotel's calendar and kept as short as possible.

Furniture, fixtures and equipment are often bought by the hotel directly. Deliveries have to match the room blocks, because there's rarely anywhere to store a floor's worth of headboards, and someone has to take the packaging away.

What to send us

Send us the room schedule, plans if you have them, what you want done to each type of room, and the trading calendar: the busy weekends and events you can't afford to lose. We'll tell you how we would split the hotel into blocks, how the noisy work would be handled and what it's likely to cost, with the phased working priced in from the start. More on our approach is on our hospitality fit-out page.