As you see in the following illustration, defining a hotel’s positioning is an essential part of every hotel concept we create at MAp Boutique Consultancy.

Once we know what your hotel’s unique Purpose is, and for which People your hotel exists, we embark on defining your hotel’s unique position on the MAp.

Our hotel clients always get excited about this hotel positioning exercise. But, there is a small “downer” you should know: even if we strive to achieve a clear and unique hotel positioning, ultimately it is not us who decides what the hotel positioning is. The hotel positioning is defined by your People, above all, your guests, and this implies that your control over your hotel positioning is limited.

This triangle is called the “Strategic Triangle” that serves to identify long-term business advantages or, as we call it, success potential. Sometimes it is also called the 3C Model, showing the tension field and interplay (therefore we use a triangle) that consists between Customer, Competitor and Company.

And: hotel positioning is the image (place) you own in the minds of your guests, when they compare your hotel with the hotels of your competitors.

Now that you understand what hotel positioning is, let’s walk step-by-step in how we at MAp define a hotel’s unique positioning. The fact is, we are experiencing a crowded marketplace. Therefore, we aim to achieve a hotel positioning that:

• Focuses on relevancy
• Focuses on differentiation from competition
• Is credible and attainable
• Finds a place on the MAp where you / your services are the only answer for a specific someone Now as the last sentence implies, to create your unique hotel positioning you MUST DEFINE for WHOM you are working / WHO this specific someone is.

Only if you have your defined buyer personas ready (= your target guests) you can answer an important question: How do you find your unique position on the MAp? Therefore, if you haven’t defined your buyer personas yet – now’s the time to do it!

Next, you have to know on which MAp to position your hotel. When working with clients, we like to use a simple and effective positioning matrix. For the purposes of this blog post, let’s keep it simple, and that means you should decide if your MAp is i.e. boutique luxury hotels, family hotels, boutique city hotels, etc.

Once you have defined in which segment to position your hotel, most often you’ll realise that you’re not the first to do so! Even if you’re tapping into a growing market and seeking to serve your specific audience better than your competitors, our MAp advice is to keep digging and to add a further niche into the mix. And, of course, to strive to add something new and exciting to the segment and the hospitality landscape at large. 

Once you’ve defined your position on the MAp, it’s time to put it down in words. You can do so by crafting a hotel positioning statement. We’ll give you MAp’s positioning statement as an example.

MAp Boutique Consultancy

TO… Innovative investors and boutique hoteliers that need direction, empowerment and support in getting their ventures off the ground, levelling up and setting a strong foundation for growth

MAp IS… the leader in developing and empowering sustainable and innovative hotels and brands

THAT… makes hotels matter by creating a better future for People and Planet.

What’s yours?

TO… __________________________ (target audience / buyer personas) ________(your hotel) IS… __________________________ (your position on the map) THAT… __________________________ (what you will do for your target audience / buyer personas)

And another blog post comes to an end. Maybe we can summarise what we’ve learned today about hotel positioning best with a quote from Simon Sinek:

“In order to stand out, we have to know what we stand for.”

We hope that after our time together, what YOU stand for is much clearer. And if not, please do not hesitate to contact us in order to find your unique hotel positioning on the MAp.

The start of each new year brings with it a spate of articles touting the most anticipated and hottest hotel openings for the year ahead, and despite the pandemic, 2021 was no different! Just take a look at this Forbes article and this Conde Nast Traveller article to get a sense for the new offerings flooding the market this year alone.

The hotel landscape looked very different 20 years ago, when there were less offerings, bigger players and clearer differentiation between brands. Today, the market is saturated. And if you factor in the disruption of new entrants, such as Airbnb and the like, it is no surprise that customers struggle when faced with so much choice.

So how do hotels discover, create and maintain their competitive edge? How do they distinguish their offering and add value to guests? How do they remain relevant to today’s consumers? The answer is with a strong and sustainable hotel concept.

A hotel concept is the basis for everything that follows. It’s the foundational idea that defines your hotel’s brand, character, product + services, sales + marketing, and more. It curates a distinctive identity in the market and in the eyes of your clearly-defined target group.

Furthermore, it acts as a strategic and creative outline on how to realise a hotel venture by piecing together various elements (“soft” and “hard” facts) and outlining to all stakeholders HOW your hotel should look and feel and WHY that is.

At MAp, we craft our hotel concepts around the following key elements:

• Purpose: WHY you exist beyond making profit. Read here why defining your purpose beyond making profit will actually make you profit.
• Principles: Your vision, mission and values.
• People: The people you are serving with a solution to their problems, as well as the people you are working/partnering with to make an impact.
• Story: The unique story that you – and only you – are telling in order to emotionally connect with your people.
• Positioning + USPs: What differentiates you in the market.

These constituent pieces, together, form one complete whole, laying the foundation of your hotel project.

Whether you are a hotelier looking to develop a boutique hotel or are part of a hotel group looking to reposition your existing hotels, a clearly-defined and sustainable hotel concept offers many benefits:

• Gives you clarity on the what, how, why
• Aligns your stakeholders around a shared purpose and vision
• Enables you to use resources more efficiently (think time, money, etc.) - but also the resources of our planet
• Makes you stand out from the crowd (as you know what you stand for)
• Creates a better future for your hotel and business, for people and planet

Hotels with strong concepts are able to demand a premium price, provide a coherent guest experience, sell and market themselves smartly, recruit talented staff and a community following, and have a marketable platform when pitching for investors and partners.

Our holistic and end-to-end process for developing hotel concepts consists of the following steps:

1) Concept Discovery: Set the groundwork by looking inwards at your goals, motivations, strengths and weaknesses, and outwards at your competition, the market and innovative trends.

2) Concept Development: Using the insights collected in the Discovery phase, address each of the key elements of your hotel concept in order to define its core idea.

3) Concept Activation: Translate your hotel concept into the operations of your hotel, by applying it to your product + services, brand, and sales + marketing.

4) Concept Implementation: Identify strategic partners and ensure they are aligned and in keeping with the hotel concept, all the way up through (re-)launch.

With a strong hotel concept in place, your hotel stands out from the competition. But more importantly, it stands for something. So before kickstarting any type of hotel project, make sure you first establish what your hotel concept is. As MAp says, “First the concept, then comes the rest.”

In need of some inspiration? Check out our Hotel Concept Trends 2021 blog post.