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HOW TO PULL OFF INTIMACY IN A 1,000-ROOM- PLUS, FIVE- STAR HOTEL.
Contributed by DANIEL HOSTETTLER, PRESIDENT & CEO, THE BOCA RATON
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Independent luxury hotels are typically small: The median room count of the hotels in the Relais & Châteaux portfolio for North America was around 40 when I served as president there. At such properties, success at knowing every guest by name and preference seems achievable; the GM can personally greet VIPs and treat every guest as a VIP, too. Doing that with more than 1,000 rooms and |
2,200 employees is another thing altogether. How can you achieve the same intimate relationship? I had to figure this out in a hurry.
In April 2021, I took over the reins of the 1,047-room The Boca Raton in South Florida( the largest non-gaming luxury resort operation in North America), with a mandate from management: Lift the hotel to Forbes’ Five-Star standards and a 100 % market share against
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the legacy competitive set. They asked that this be accomplished before the resort’ s 100th anniversary, in January 2026.( To make this harder, the hotel was in mid-phase I of a multiyear renovation plan.)
INTIMACY AT SCALE My strategy for achieving this goal was to segment the property’ s 1,000-plus rooms into five distinct“ hotels,” ranging in size from 65 to
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32 hotelsmag. com November 2025 |