Hotelier: When signing international brands or chefs, what factors do you have to take into account?

Marc: Customer mix and what positioning we want, what style of hotel it is, and where it is located in a city or a region. That will drive a brand or franchise, a lease, a joint venture with a celebrity chef, or an in-house concept depending on what we want to achieve for the company that manages the hotel, as well as the owner.

Niki: Also, where is your business coming from? If you’re bringing a famous celebrity chef from America, they’re not necessarily well known. But if they’re bringing many American customers with them to the hotel, then it becomes a destination.

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Elias: We have a location and then we shortlist brands to fit into that location.

Marc: We need to shift the other way around. In the past, because of a hotel’s location, it needs to find something to [incentivise people to] get there instead of looking at what the market needs and then designing the hotels and the number of outlets we want based on that and dynamics.

Elias: Successful openings and partnerships are hotels which have thought about that before opening and knew what would be outsourced and have a good mix.

Marc: Sometimes an owner will say he wants 10 restaurants and you come back and say, no we want to have only five. We also want to be driving the decisions based on the market dynamics, but otherwise you will end up with concepts which are empty, not because they are not good concepts, but because they are not the right concepts for that location.

Mikael: Yes, we want restaurants to be independent and have that feel but you can’t forget the hotel you represent. There needs to be a synergy between what type of hotel you have, what type of customer you have, and what you want to deliver.

Gianluca: A lot of that discussion has to do with ownership and how much are they willing to invest.

Adam: And how much freedom they’re going to give you.