F&B: Top Mistakes & Biggest Opportunities - Scot Turner, Auden Hospitality

Josiah: Where do you feel hoteliers go wrong with food and beverage? And what are some of the opportunities that you see for bringing excellence to this area of hospitality?

Scot: When I get asked this question, I always start with a story about how I moved to Dubai, where we opened a restaurant, and I got the P&L from the finance team for the first time. I went down the P&L, and everything looked the same as a hotel versus a restaurant. And so you get to that little bit at the bottom with utilities, rents, and business taxes. And I'd never seen these lines on the P&L before. And I was a bit like, why would we have these things on here? Like that isn't, that isn't what sits on the restaurant P&L. And I always remember the owner of the business just turning around and going, , "Listen, sunshine, you're not in hotels anymore. Now you're in the real world!" And it was this big chunk of cash that was coming out of the profit at the bottom that restauranteurs had to work towards as well. And that, just for me, just sums up how restauranteurs have to earn that little bit extra to make ends meet. And when you really dissect that and strip that right back, they invest a lot of their own money. They build something that sits on the high street. There's the risk involved like they're all in when they run restaurants. So when they then go into running that, they have to have a real business mindset alongside the quality and the conceptual mindset to make the business work in the end. And I think when it goes to hotels, there's this real safety net of the bedrooms upstairs. And for that, in my experience, I think too many hoteliers look at the restaurant as an amenity rather than a revenue center or a proper true revenue source. And it isn't run independent. It's kind of there. The in-house guest always gets preference, and what happens then is the concept kind of gets a little bit diluted, and the local community gets forgotten about, and it gets put into this kind of middle area where it doesn't really know what it wants to be. Does it want to be a hotel amenity? Does it want to be an independent restaurant that has locals in there? But it's all just a bit disjointed, and it gets diluted. And then it doesn't start working, and people start questioning, and more people have inputs. So it gets diluted again. Then it just gets to this point where everyone just accepts that it doesn't do very well and that F&B doesn't do great, but it still serves breakfast for the guests. So it's important that we have this space there. So yeah, I really believe that there's a huge opportunity for food and beverage in hotels. If we go back maybe 10, 15 years, maybe a little bit more, hotel F&B was the place to go. It's where the chefs wanted to be. It was where people went because they wanted to show off or they wanted to go for business meetings and they wanted to see innovation. And we've kind of lost that a little bit, but I think there's a huge opportunity to bring that back. And when you look at some of the great hotels that do great F&B. They've got those F&B environments that have a great vibe. Everywhere kind of has a purpose for the guest, depending on what that visit might be. And it makes a huge difference to how guests perceive the F&B space.

Josiah: I would like to hear you talk a little bit more about what excellence looks like. Hearing you talk, there is this mindset shift from it just being an amenity to it needing to stand on its own from a revenue perspective. But does having that revenue perspective also drive excellence and other elements of the experience you might have in this concept?

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