Vendor & Amenity Alignment: Crucial for Success

We often find clients struggling with decisions regarding amenities, activities, and vendors. What might look like a great idea or a perfect fit could be money poorly spent and guest experience diminished.

Take Food and Beverage for example. This is a perfect example of where the wrong fit could come back to bite you in a big way. Let me share an example from the real world.

Outdoor resort X catered to families. Their market niche was two adults with two school aged children. Their heavy checkin day was Friday, but since most parents work, they arrived at this resort sometime around 9 PM.

This resort leased food operations to a local restaurant. All went well...at first. After a few months, the tenant was struggling with labor and costs and starting setting his own hours. So the front desk sends their very hungry guests to the deli at 9 PM only for the guests to find the "Closed" sign hung and the staff long gone.

When the deli lessee was confronted, he said he had lost his night cook so he decided to start closing early. The front desk had no idea, since they knew he was to be open until 11. So the property suffers from a tenant who has issues of his own and the guests are the collateral damage.

Worst of all, when the guests get online to write a review-the closed deli is a major complaint. They do not care it was the properties tenant, all they knew is they were hungry, the deli was to be open, and it was not. This complaint is lodged against the property as a whole-not the tenant.

This is just one of the ways a property can be mismatched with the wrong vendor or amenity. Some other examples we have seen are spending money on a mini golf course at a resort with an adult market niche, building expensive pickle ball courts at a park that caters to kids and families, or parks on a lake thinking there is no need for a pool. All of these are examples of mismatched vendors, market niches and amenity packages. These mistakes can be VERY costly and planning correctly from the start can not only be a money saving exercise, but it makes the guest/amenity match a perfect fit from the start.