Boutique Hotel Market - Mr and Mrs Smith Hotel - Case Study Example

As a publishing company, Mr and Mrs Smith must understand what its readers want and how to offer a definitive guide to offering a unique travel experience. A key process is researching the supplier side of the market and understanding the trend in the hospitality and tourism industry. An environmental analysis of the global hospitality market and world tourism trends were also presented, in addition to highlighting the boutique market.Everyone seems to disagree on the subject of boutique hotels: on what is and what is not; on where they are to be found and where not; on their best pricing policy and the true economics; on their fashion status or long-term promise.

In particular, on what to call the market sector. Boutique, as defined by the Oxford dictionary, is “a small shop or department of a store, selling (esp. fashionable) clothes or accessories.”Large chain hotels often equate boutique hotel with the designer hotel. The risk in this is that leading-edge design is often a characteristic of this new and healthy hotel baby, but is not by any means the whole story. Lumping ‘design’ and ‘boutique’ together misses the point.

This sector actually reflects all the fragmentation tendencies of consumer markets - especially those for premium-priced goods - the world over. The reason for the sector’s growth is the reason for its fragmentation: individuality. This individuality - of guest, or proprietor, of the site, of staff, of hotel atmosphere - is reflected in the design, but it may well not be driven by design.In fact, Mark Lomanno, President of Smith Travel Research, comments, “Strangely enough, (for boutique hotels) demand seems to increase as supply rises and it falls when the rate of growth in new properties slows down.

” Lomanno calculates that boutique hotels in the US have significantly outperformed other luxury hotels on all dimensions except supply over the five years to end-2000 (See Figure 1).In this paper, we investigate the phenomenal growth of boutique hotels in the market.