Flat-screen televisions, satellite radio, spa treatments, yoga, vials of scented oil on pillows – Rhode Island hotels are spending lots of cash to offer luxury amenities to their guests.
It’s all about differentiating themselves by offering something that others don’t.
But the financial rewards of these expensive amenities remain unknown. Hotel managers say they think there is a return on investment of luxury, but don’t have the data to back it up.
“We’re not able to measure it,” said Stuart Meyerson, general manager at the Hyatt Regency Newport. The hotel does pay attention to guests, he said, but “there are no tools to measure the impact of additional amenities.”
Robert Kok, associate professor of hospitality management at Johnson & Wales University, said hotels have to add unique amenities, “or you don’t compete.” Yet there are also dangers in what he calls an “amenity creep,” he added: Mid-sized hotels, especially, can lose customers if they increase their room rates to offset the cost of amenities.
For upscale hotels, on the other hand, Kok said, luxury amenities probably do pay off.
The Providence Biltmore Hotel has noticed increased sales since the addition of an Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa last year, said Tina Harlow, general manager. The spa looks to accommodate the hotel’s guests by hiring extra staff when it’s heavily booked.
In addition, the Biltmore is in the process of adding flat-screen TVs to its rooms, along with existing luxury amenities such as king-sized beds, larger shower heads, satin sheets and pillow tops for mattresses. The next project is installing satellite radio in all 257 rooms.
Harlow said for the past year and a half, with more money available for renovation projects, the hotel has gotten “really in tune” with what’s going on in the consumer market.
“We watch the market outside the hotel,” she said. “We know from king bed sales in general that king beds are what everybody’s looking for.” Ditto for the entertainment market and the resulting addition of flat-screen TVs and satellite radio.
Meyerson said the Hyatt’s corporate offices pay attention to trends in the consumer markets, which affect the guidelines for replacement of hotel amenities.
For example, Hyatt recently made treadmills with attached TVs the new standard for its chains, meaning that when the existing treadmills are due for replacement, they’ll be upgraded. The same goes for its televisions, which will be replaced with flat-screen units.
The hotel is keeping up with national trends, Meyerson said. “When you look at our industry in the last few years, you see all the hotels upgrading beds, sheets, terry cloth products, shower heads,” he said.
But the Hyatt Regency Newport doesn’t just offer the luxury amenities dictated by the chain’s corporate office.
In the last year, the hotel’s spa started offering thallosotherapy, a detoxifying skin treatment using products from the sea such as seaweed. It is a way of capitalizing on the hotel’s unique location on an island, Meyerson said.
The hotel also recently added a yoga program to its pay-per-view TV offerings, he said, because consumer trends show more and more people are practicing the meditative exercise.
Linda Naiss, director of marketing and sales at the Bristol Harbor Inn, a boutique-style inn on the Bristol waterfront, said providing the finest amenities to guests while keeping accommodation rates competitive in the market is a balancing act.
“If you are a quality, upscale facility, you need to be on the cutting edge,” Naiss said. The inn recently added a line of high-end toiletries, and it informs guests of the availability of spa treatments through the Alayne White Spa & Body Boutique, in the hotel, though it does not package spa treatments with room rates.
Even hotels that don’t have a spa or yoga center on the premises sometimes provide packages with those nearby.
The Hotel Providence offers a “Girls’ Great Escape” package with local spas that combine the cost of spa treatments with accommodation, said Suzanne Grogan, the hotel’s director of sales and marketing.
Before the boutique hotel opened about a year ago, Grogan said, it organized consumer focus groups to determine amenities people looked for in a hotel. The focus groups prompted the hotel to provide high-end Molten Brown toiletries and makeup mirrors in all the rooms.
“Hotel Providence filled a good need for people willing to pay for the extra amenities,” said David DePetrillo, director of tourism for the R.I. Economic Development Corporation. “There was a demand for that.”
An upsurge of traveling baby boomers might be another reason hotels can offer more luxury without losing customers, Kok said. Baby boomers might have more money to spend at upscale hotels as their children reach the age of self-sufficiency.
Asked whether investing in luxury amenities is paying off for Hotel Providence, Grogan replied: “I think so. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be doing it.”
