Two Audiences, One Pool

Attracting customers who never book a room can be a significant opportunity for luxury hotels and resorts. Whether it becomes a business depends on what the property has already promised its resident guests, and on who runs the venue and on what terms.

A resort's only pool can look like an obvious opportunity for a beach club. Bring in a recognised name, attract an external audience and generate revenue from daybeds, food and drink.

Except the hotel may already have promised that pool, and the loungers around it, to everyone paying to stay.

For a beach-club model built partly on selling daybeds and cabanas, the availability of those spaces is the economics. The resort needs to honour its guest offer. The club needs inventory it can sell. A forecast that overlooks this tension assumes the same space can fulfil two competing promises.

It is the kind of detail that can disappear in a conversation about brands, yet determine whether a concept works.

Having worked across luxury lifestyle hotels, resorts and F&B, I believe owners should ask more of the spaces around their rooms. One useful starting question is:

Would somebody come here if they had absolutely no intention of staying at the hotel?

A restaurant, bar or beach club that gives people a reason to visit opens the property to an audience beyond its room inventory. Whether that opportunity becomes a worthwhile business depends on decisions that usually receive less attention than the brand name.

The revenue picture gives owners a reason to look closely. In CBRE's US sample, rooms revenue grew by 1.1% in 2025 while food and beverage revenue rose 4.3%, driven by food sales in hotel restaurants and local catering. The figures do not separate external customers from price increases, but they point somewhere owners should be looking. (CBRE's full-year analysis in LODGING)

Rooms generally remain the more profitable department. The commercial case for destination F&B has to stand on its own contribution, including the costs and complexity it brings.

In resort models I have worked with, F&B could account for close to half of total revenue. Restaurants, bars and beach clubs had their own audiences and their own reasons to visit. Treating them mainly as services for the people staying upstairs would have missed most of their value.

In a seasonal destination, a well-positioned beach club can give locals and visitors staying elsewhere a reason to come to the resort. It can also hold demand into the shoulder months, where there is an audience to attract and a proposition suited to that time of year.

But not every stretch of beach, and certainly not every hotel pool, can carry that model.

Location and access are fundamental. People have to be willing to make the journey, find the venue and enter it comfortably. A strong name and good marketing cannot compensate for a site that is difficult to reach, or for an arrival that makes visitors feel they are intruding into somebody else's hotel.

Then there is the pool itself. If it is the resort's only swimming facility, with loungers included in the room stay, the property has committed the same inventory twice. Priority booking for hotel guests and complimentary use of every bed are entirely different commercial arrangements, and the difference between them is the business case.

I would want to see a credible alternative pool offer for residents before treating a second outlet as an external beach-club business. The access policy should be settled before the revenue forecast. What does the room rate include? Which beds are available to sell? What happens when the hotel and the club are both full?

There is also a cost that never appears in the revenue line. At a certain rate, part of what the guest is paying for is not having to share the property with a crowd. A busy venue can be a poor commercial fit if its success spends the exclusivity the room rate was priced on.

Which brings the question round to who should be running the venue, and on what terms.

Being a good hotel operator does not automatically make a company a good restaurateur. Owners should be able to ask whether the hotel operator has a credible F&B concept and the team to deliver it, or whether a specialist would be better placed. Running the venue directly, working with a restaurant partner and leasing to an independent operator are different choices, each with consequences for control, investment and return.

Direct operation can work where the hotel company has shown it can attract the intended audience and run the concept well. A specialist partnership may bring local credibility or capability the hotel does not have. A lease may suit a venue that can function independently, where the owner prefers rental income to direct exposure to restaurant trading.

A recognised name may attract initial interest. It still has to suit the available space, access, local spending patterns, seasonality and hotel audience. In my experience, an operator's willingness to adapt to those conditions is worth more than the profile of the brand.

The fee structure deserves the same scrutiny as the concept, and it usually gets less. Where a base management fee is calculated on gross revenue that includes the venue's sales, higher turnover increases that fee whether or not the margin justified the volume, and whatever that volume cost the resident guest experience. An incentive fee tied to profit may provide a counterweight, but it does not remove the need for owners to assess their own return. The definition of revenue deserves as much attention as the fee percentage. (Holland & Knight on management-agreement accounting definitions)

A lease changes the exposure but raises its own questions. What remains within the hotel operator's remit? Does rent enter the fee calculation? How are shared costs allocated? Who is accountable for the parts of the guest experience that cross between the two businesses? Breakfast obligations, guest access, service standards and shared facilities do not disappear because a different company runs the restaurant.

The recent announcement about Chemin à la Mer at Four Seasons Hotel New Orleans shows the choices involved. The hotel announced a September 23 move from the fifth floor to a first-floor location, with chef partner Donald Link's restaurant taking on a Louisiana brasserie format and an expanded lunch offer intended to welcome locals and the downtown business community. 

That is a change in access, format and occasion, delivered through an existing culinary partnership rather than an in-house concept. It is too early to judge the commercial result, but the intention is clear: make the restaurant relevant to more of the people around it.

For owners, this broadens what a hotel brand should bring to an asset. Some operators will have strong concepts of their own. Others will be more valuable because they know which partners to bring in and how to structure the relationship.

None of this means every square metre should be monetised. Luxury depends on space, generosity and the freedom to enjoy a property without being asked to spend at every turn. A quiet pool reserved for residents can be doing valuable commercial work through the room rate and the desire to return, without generating a separate transaction. But a space intended to operate commercially deserves a realistic assessment of its audience, its constraints and its economics before a concept is chosen.

The ability to draw people who will never sleep in the hotel is worth paying for. Whether this particular property can turn that demand into a business, without spending the thing its room rate depends on, is the question the owner has to answer first.