A hotel can lose its whole first year before it opens a single room. I have seen it happen: a kitchen too small for the restaurant it serves, a laundry placed where the trolleys cannot reach, a team hired two weeks before opening and never properly trained. None of these are bad luck. They are planning problems, and they are avoidable.

Here is how I walk owners through the twelve months before opening day.

12 to 9 months before opening: get the building right

This is the cheapest moment to fix mistakes, because they are still on paper. I review the plans with an operator’s eye – guest rooms, kitchens, laundry, storage and staff areas. We agree the concept and the guests we want to attract, and we set realistic room rates. This is also when the pre-opening budget and the first-year operating budget are prepared, together with the full lists of furniture, fixtures and equipment.

9 to 6 months: choose the people and the systems

The general manager and heads of department should be in place now, not later. We choose the technology – property management system, point of sale, channel manager and booking engine – and start building the brand, the website and the photography. Contracts with tour operators and online travel agencies begin here, because good contracts take time.

6 to 3 months: build the team and open sales

We recruit the full team and write the standard operating procedures they will work by. The website goes live and bookings open. Accounting, purchasing and cost control are set up so that the first invoice is handled properly, not improvised.

The last 3 months: train, test and hand over

Every department trains, then trains again. We run mock stays with friends and partners and fix what they find. The building is received from the contractors with a proper snag list, and every item of the opening inventory is counted. Every system is tested from booking to check-out. Then comes a soft opening, a round of fixes, and only then the grand opening.

One piece of advice

Bring your operator in early. An operator who joins during design saves you far more than they cost, because every change after construction is expensive.

If you are building a hotel in Egypt or Saudi Arabia and want a second pair of eyes on your plans, get in touch.

— Maged Farid, Managing Director, LOOK Hotels International

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