K Hotels LLC, a Beverly Hills, California, based boutique hotel sales and marketing company, is succeeding by doing what boutique hotels do best. That includes tailoring its experience to the small meetings market, with food and beverage leading the way.

K Hotels has been a source for “distinct, independent hotels for travel professionals and consumers” for more than 15 years. The company, relaunched in 2007 as K Hotels (formerly Kerry Hotels), provides full-service sales, marketing, and reservations services to its collection of 50 independently owned three-, four-, and five-star properties in 13 countries. Small group meetings—sales, marketing, planning, or budgeting meetings for personnel ranging from entry- to executive-level—account for about a quarter of K Hotels’ business. Why?

“First, attendees don’t get lost in the shuffle of a big hotel,” says VP John Sears. A boutique hotel, he points out, averages between 50 and 100 rooms, while the average meeting includes 26 people. “Twenty-six people can get lost in a 500-room hotel with thousands of square feet of meeting space and multiple meetings going on,” Sears says. Generally, a boutique hotel has only one or two meetings occurring at a given time. “It’s more of a private club setting.”

Sears likens holding a small meeting at a boutique hotel to shopping for a gift on a special occasion. “When buying a gift for an acquaintance, it might make sense to go to a department store. If it’s for a close friend or loved one, and you want to send a special gift, would you go to a big department store? Or would you shop at a specialty boutique that can offer a personalized gift?

“It’s the same thing with a boutique hotel, whether it’s a meeting or a food and beverage experience,” he continues. “It may not be for everyone, but that special event can be tailored more intimately at a special boutique hotel than at an ordinary hotel. They do a good job but are sometimes just run-of-the-mill.”

The food and beverage program at a boutique property can be customized, again, because of the smaller nature of both the meeting and the property. It can be executed, delivered, and timed more easily, Sears says, “when the number-one focus is the group that’s there, versus one of many groups.”

THEME AND FLAVOR
The food and beverage focus at a small meeting often enhances the stay “because boutique hotels generally have a theme, a flavor, or a distinct setting,” says Sears. “So if you go to a hip hotel in San Francisco or a beach hotel in Miami, the food can be tailored around that theme so that it adds to the overall destination experience— the meeting, the dining, and the hotel are all in tune with each other.”

At the same time, foodservice is similarly tailored to the group. For a small managers’ meeting or executive board meeting, Sears says, it can reflect anything from “health conscious or dietary restricted to an indulgent, ‘Let’s get all the cholesterol we can’ menu.” On the beach, for example, “figure on having a light meal in the heat. If it’s a very elegant luxury hotel, a sophisticated Russian-style sauce might be prepared at the coffee breaks.”

Menu development across the hotels is obviously decentralized. Sears says the menus throughout the collection are “very diverse and guest-centric. If it’s a hip hotel in London, like K West Hotel & Spa, food and beverage is designed for that crowd. If it’s a Miami hotel, like the Pelican Hotel on Ocean Drive (in South Beach), it may have an Italian-themed restaurant but with South Beach flair.”

The duration of breaks at the hotels is always up to the group and generally last from 15 to 30 minutes. Some K hotels also offer what it terms “the all-day refreshment break” that is, as the name implies, continually refreshed.

The Lato Boutique Hotel in Greece offers breaks featuring hand-rolled cigars. Says Sears, “If people are looking for the ultimate boutique meeting experience,” this is it. “There is an afternoon break in which a cigar roller will roll a Cuban, Honduran, Costa Rican, or Brazilian cigar for attendees.”

Other themed breaks focus on employee education and training. For instance, some include a “puzzle solver” or a “meeting recap,” which is K Hotels’ term for a spontaneous quiz, says Sears. “The meeting planner might prearrange [the quiz] to catch people relaxed or offguard to recap the morning session.”

While larger hotels often make amenities and/or activities available for families of meeting attendees, boutique hotels don’t, and for good reason, says Sears. “Generally, the meetings our hotels do are for small groups that come in really focused on accomplishing something. They visit without the family,” he says. Most family meetings are held around “the bigger beach resorts,” he adds, “where there are larger facilities and more people to interact with. The nice thing about boutique properties is that, being smaller, there are also fewer distractions.” “Boutique hotels,” says Sears, “were the first type of hotel, originating hundreds of years ago as family-owned inns. People have always congregated to have discussions, and as the hotel industry grew and hotels got bigger, meetings got better, so the big hotels served large meetings. Many focused and important meetings have taken place at small hotels for decades.”

The boutique hotels that K represents in their collection “have always been the ideal destination for quiet, serious meetings,” Sears maintains. “It’s just coming more into the limelight now that boutique hotels are becoming mainstream.”

Howard Riell is a frequent contributor to HOTEL F&B.