Hotel Concepts

Today’s fast-paced changing lifestyles make for the consumer market to proliferate. This proliferation has its implications on how marketers see the environment, how they have to react on it and how hoteliers seek opportunities. Since the inception of the boutique hotel concept, a reaction to the box hotel concept, the hotel industry has undergone various shifts and changes. Some of these changes are due to the proliferation of the consumer market. In fact, as this thesis will point out, the hotel market with the new concepts called to life has equally proliferated.

Hotel managers have different views on these trends but agree that hotel concepts are unique value propositions, defined by the hotel (chain) themselves. Even though a form of un-clarity exists on the classification or grade of luxury offered, hotels remain experience providers regardless of their nature and class. We have also found that it is the concept itself that has become more important in order to offer guests an experience, not the grade of hotel visited.

We therefore propose a model or framework; the Concept Initiator Framework (C.I.F.). The framework enables marketers in single units or larger chains to better understand the workings of the forces that initiate concept ideas. This creative process is a crucial phase in order to incept new concepts. Concept development is therefore a cyclical interactive process where hotel marketers and market are interacting with each other.