The resort planning and development process starts with a spark of inspiration and ends with the doors opening to welcome your first guests. It’s as intensive and exciting a process as it is complex, requiring a wide variety of project professionals to come together across different stages of the project. It has to be approached logically, strategically and in an orderly fashion in order to successfully deliver a bricks-and-mortar resort on time and on budget.

In this article, we’ll leverage our extensive experience as resort development consultants to take you through all the fundamentals of how to plan and successfully execute a resort and hotel development project.

What is Involved in Hotel & Resort Development?

The real estate development process for a resort or hotel project encompasses everything from concept and feasibility to procurement and construction through to operations and marketing. While the process is tailored to each individual project, the focus is always the same – to take a critical, expert-driven approach to develop a solid business plan, mitigate risks, and smooth out the path to successful delivery.

When the right approach is applied to the resort development process, these leisure assets will have a solid foundation as a successful business and investment, helping to manage risk more effectively, attract investors, and produce high-performance, income-generating assets.

6 steps to Building Your Hotel Development Checklist

The development plan guides every aspect of the hotel development process, laying out each step between your business idea and the final result. Here are the typical hotel development checklists items or phases of this critical process.

Step 1 – Resort Concept and Creative Vision

Concept planning is all about vision – what you want the hotel or resort project to encompass, how it will be truly differentiated, and what’s important to make this vision a reality. The resort concept outline goes well beyond the overarching creative idea, however, and you can expect to get involved with:

• Assessing how to assemble your hotel development team based on established track records, relevant qualifications, experience, and cost.

• Identifying gaps in expertise and bringing in qualified professionals on an as-needed basis

• Developing your hotel or resort project objective and brand identity

• Starting market surveillance

• Organising the capital stack and building the ownership structure

Step 2 – The Resort Feasibility Study

The hotel feasibility study is an in-depth analysis focusing on determining whether the resort concept is viable as a profitable business, looking at elements such as:

• The macro-environment, including current economic conditions, hotel industry trends, etc.

• Physical feasibility, including review of the site, utilities, traffic and access points, local environmental or governmental restrictions to the site, nearby amenities, transportation, etc. Your local area needs to be able to support your resort development in terms of skills, produce, supplies and ongoing revenues, etc. The location of the site, accessibility of the site, and zoning restrictions must align with market demands.

• Market feasibility, including local demographics and local economic conditions, trends in the area, local tourist attractions, tourism trends, and transport links. Thinking about what will attract your target market to the site and enhance their experience, as well as how much a room is expected to earn based on the target market, economic conditions, and expected seasonal occupancy.

• Product mix, size and resort design focus - honing in on the opportunities to create a more compelling product that delivers higher guest satisfaction without incurring additional project cost.

• Project cost evaluation, including budget estimates, costs, cash flow pro formas, architectural and construction costs, and even cost analysis for various financing options (independent business vs a franchise resort, for example).

• Project recommendations, including financing recommendations, forms of development to limit operating risks, hotel sustainability recommendations, etc.

It is vitally important not to short-change the feasibility study process, depth, and reporting. This process forms the foundation of your resort development business plan, aligning the economic environment, market expectations, and costs with the project itself.

Step 3 – Procurement and Pre-Construction

Once the project has been specific and deemed to be feasible, the real work begins. This includes:

• Securing financing for your hotel according to the recommended financial model based on available financing channels, analysis to determine the most effective sources of financing structure for the project’s return on equity, economics, and debt service coverage.

• Finalising the owner/equity structure for your business

• Developing and evolving hotel architectural plans from concept to schematic through to detailed architectural design

• Securing of relevant permits and permissions

• Detailed sustainability assessment - identifying opportunities for a more sustainable real estate/hotel design and procurement strategy, working with project teams to incorporate and implement into design details.

• Selecting a construction method, construction team and project manager

• Finalising contracts and budgets as well as schedules (when each team needs to be on-site, as well as an overall construction schedule to keep the project on track) 

• Finalising a wide variety of other pre-construction deliverables, such as risk analysis, site planning, allocating engineering teams, cash flow analysis, and other executable aspects to ready the project for a seamless construction phase.

Step 4 – Hotel & Resort Construction

In this phase, your project begins to become a physical reality! The construction phase will differ in length due to factors such as project size, location, and complexity, but more generally includes:

• Preparation of the hotel or resort site

• Continuous monitoring of the schedule and budgets

• Continuous monitoring of the site to ensure safety compliance, quality of the work

• Working with regulatory bodies and inspectors to ensure compliance

• Addressing on-site changes and modifications

• Completing contracts with vendors

• Securing permits for occupancy

Typically, the resort or hotel construction phase can take up to 24 months and is one of the longest periods in the hotel development process. As a result, it’s important to actively work to keep construction on schedule and on budget by scheduling teams with precision, ensuring the right resources are made available, and monitoring the process at all times. 

This can be expedited by using qualified and experienced contractors, prioritising key milestones, ensuring some areas of flexibility in the construction timetable, and building realistic contingencies into the budget. It can also be highly de-risked through strategic contract agreements with your senior construction partners, taking a lot of risk and stress out of the process if structured correctly.

Step 5 – Hotel & Resort Marketing

When preparing to open the doors to your new resort for the first time, you’ll want to begin generating awareness with your target markets well in advance. This is a great opportunity to whet their appetites, getting them excited to see it for themselves – and that means developing powerful resort marketing. Usually beginning 12 months prior to your scheduled opening date, the hotel development process will include:

• Developing your hotel brand message and voice for a consistent tone across digital and traditional marketing channels. Your brand is the business’s personality, and the right brand helps to deliver a competitive edge, build trust with your market, open new revenue channels and transform loyal customers into powerful brand advocates. The key to a great hotel brand is to focus on being authentic, social, having a meaningful message, and finding what makes your offering truly unique.

• Researching your target audience, including their digital habits, values, travel priorities, and more. This will help the hotel or resort business develop a solid and appealing sales funnel, as well as implementing the most effective tech for booking via mobile, desktop, and tablet.

• Create an aesthetically pleasing, highly functional website with high-quality visuals, a simple booking experience, all the right information on what makes your offering unique, and connections to all key channels.

• Establish a strong online presence through digital marketing, including claiming your Google My Business page and social media pages, as well as your overall search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.

• Establish your online advertising strategy, including PPC and social media ads. Develop your campaigns so that they create all the right hype well before the doors open to get bookings flowing.

Step 6 – Hotel and Resort Operations

Now we’re getting into the nuts and bolts of a live, running resort. The process of getting the operations on track includes:

• Developing the structure of the resort operations team

• Recruiting key management team members through careful vetting & analysis. Key team members may include your GM, DOS, HR Director and Exec Chef or F&B Director. Spending the time to source the right individuals, and ensure they are fully onboarded and vested in the project vision prior to any further recruitment, is critical to the creation of a successful company culture. This will generate optimised guest experiences but also minimise costly and damaging staff turnover for years to come.

• Assisting management in recruiting staff members for all teams, including operations management, restaurant and catering, chefs and waitstaff, front of office staff, maintenance and housekeeping, concierge services, marketing, and sales teams, accounting and human resource teams, IT teams, and more.

• Implementation, maintenance, and operation of resort tech solutions

• Long-term development and implementation of unique experiential offerings that speak to your target market

• Structuring ongoing hotel development to ensure goals are reached conforming with your long-term hotel business plan

Ultimately, hotels and resorts are service businesses that are under a lot of customer pressure to deliver. The service level must be upheld to your market’s expectations, making staffing decisions some of the most critical of the entire resort development process.

Hotel Development Solutions - In Closing

Needless to say, the process of developing a successful resort is no quick or simple task. It involves bringing professionals together from a wide range of sectors, from finance and hospitality to construction and luxury real estate marketing, to bring the dream to life. Building the right team to run this process takes experience, skill, and leveraging an influential network to get everything done in the right order, at the right time, and at the right cost.

Proven Partners – Expert Resort Consulting Services

At Proven Partners, we’ve established ourselves as one of the hospitality industry’s leading resort development consultants, delivering the expertise, guidance, and experience needed to guide your project from acquisition and concept development through to operational status. Our resort development checklist and solutions work for you every step of the way, through feasibility studies, business plan development, financial structuring and capital raising, strategic resort marketing solutions, and much more. 

We are your Proven Partner in resort planning and hotel development, and our knowledge and insight can help you to move your project forward with confidence. Contact us today – let’s make your project a bricks-and-mortar reality.