Food and beverage operations, especially restaurants, play an essential role in a hotel’s ability to remain competitive and differentiate itself from other brands in the market.
About a year ago, Hilton Worldwide launched a Restaurant Concepts department to develop the brand’s food and beverage portfiolio. Beth Scott, vice president of the new department, became inundated with calls from hoteliers who needed help leasing out their spaces or who wanted to bring in third-party operators.
“At the same point in time, I had a friend who was on the eHarmony site walking me through it and this light bulb went off,” Scott recalls. If sites like eHarmony could match up likeminded people and initiate first dates, why not create a platform for hotels to match up with restaurateurs and strike deals?
Scott’s idea evolved into a Hilton internal website that helps its hotel owners and operators search for restaurant concepts. Using this interactive tool, hoteliers can browse Hilton’s database of restaurateurs with which it has established relationships, or use the “Matchmaking Wizard” to find possible food and beverage solutions that meet their specific requirements.
The service isn’t being promoted in the style of a dating website, but it’s an analogy users can easily grasp. “It’s a fun way to get people to understand what we’re trying to accomplish,” Scott says.
Creating a Profile
To use the Wizard, hoteliers would begin by filling out basic profile information. They would proceed to check off requirements for food types, atmosphere, demographic, deal structure, years in business, site criteria, and meal periods relevant to the project.
Do they want an established, fine dining restaurant that serves Mediterranean fare and will attract throngs of suburbanites? Or maybe they’re looking for a quick and casual coffeehouse that’s small in size and offers grab ’n’ go items for people on the way to the airport or office. Would they prefer to sign a development, consulting, and licensing agreement, or plan to lease?
After hoteliers submit these requirements, the program sorts through restaurateur profiles in the database and provides the hoteliers with possible concept matches to consider.
Users can dig deeper by perusing menus, photos, and brochures for the various restaurateurs, and by following links to the individual websites. “Once you’ve decided, ‘OK, I want a “first date,”’ you would be prompted by the site to fill out a very short questionnaire about your property, and then hit send, and it would automatically be sent off to the restaurateur’s designated contact person, noting that ‘I have an interest in speaking with you’ and they would begin the dialogue,” Scott says.
Scott would get copied on the initial correspondence so she can begin to track the usefulness of the system and determine how many of the conversations actually turn into deals. “We’re not here to negotiate or recommend solutions for the hotels,” she stresses. “We’re just here to introduce them to some possibilities and let them do the work from there.”
Reaching Out
To find participants, the Restaurant Concepts department first reached out to restaurateurs Hilton had existing relationships with, such as Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Mitchell’s Fish Market, and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.
“We have a consultant that I work with that represents a lot of these restaurateurs in trying to do nontraditional deals, whether it be hotels, airports, campuses, etc.,” Scott says. “And so it just started to evolve organically, solving this need that people had…and it took a lot of the intermediary process out of it.”
When the site first launched at the end of February, about 15 restaurateur profiles were loaded, with 10 more nearly ready to be posted. Scott has an internal goal of reaching 50 by the end of the year. “[Restaurateurs] only go up on the site when we’ve had in-depth conversations. It’s not like I’m just picking restaurants from the Internet that I think are cool and just throwing them up there,” Scott says. “We want them to be viable solutions; we’re not doing this as a PR tactic. We really want to help our hotels find good solutions that fit their needs.”
At a Hilton owners’ conference in January in Orlando, Fla., Scott and her team gave attendees a sneak preview of the system, which she says appeared to be well received. While it’s hard to gauge how many matches will be made through the site, Scott says one of Hilton’s hotels matched up with one of the featured concepts before the site even launched, as a result of her spreading the word about the service.
“I can see that it’s going to have some pretty quick interest and hopefully as we…continue to develop relationships with other restaurateurs that have the ability to operate in these environments under many different deal structures then we’ll continually add more restaurateurs to the site,” Scott says. “Hopefully the more we have, the more the economy will go up. Who knows?”
