Hilton Focused-Service Brands Hone F&B
By Derek Gale, Senior Editor -- Hotels, 10/22/2009 11:44:00 AM
Hilton Worldwide’s focused-service Hilton Garden Inn and Homewood Suites brands have redone their menus recently to better serve guests while also saving on costs.
According to Mark Nogal, Hilton Garden Inn vice president of brand performance and sales support, “We have engineered three different menu options for our hotel operations, meaning that we have worked with the main food purveyors to look at products that are regularly stocked with a long shelf-life to create meals that are nutritious as well as cost effective for hotels to offer.”
Specifically, HGI offers a full menu for hotels in rural markets without other food options, a “café” menu for “in-between” markets where there are some food options, and a focused menu for competitive markets where there are good quality restaurants.
The full menu has the widest selection while the focused menu restricts the items offered and can be served at the bar and via roomservice to guests. “This is a sandwich and burger tope of menu that is highly engineered so a line cook is sufficient to prepare the food and a server can act as both a restaurant/bar server as well as the roomservice runner,” Nogal explains.
He also notes that HGI hotels are required to offer roomservice for evening meal hours only; the brand has the 24-hour Pavilion Pantry adjacent to front desks as another option.
Meanwhile, over the summer (after more than two years of testing), Hilton’s Homewood Suites brand rolled out a revamped F&B program with an expanded, standardized, rotational menu to bring a greater level of consistency to the brand, while expanding the brand’s breakfast and evening meal programs.
“Our primary goal with our F&B menu revamp was to standardize our F&B offering throughout the brand to drive consistency, efficiencies in meal planning and ordering of product,” explains Dawn Koenig, vice president, hotel performance support for Homewood Suites.
The new program includes a variety of new items to develop menus with, from quiche Lorraine for breakfast to reintroduced baked goods like scones and muffins, which were a core piece of the brand’s breakfast offering when it was first launched in 1989.
In the evenings, hot meals are served Monday through Thursday and include new items like meatball subs, southwestern fajita salads, slow-smoked barbecue beef brisket, rotisserie chicken, various pastas and more.
Meanwhile, “We were careful to continue to provide healthy options like low-fat yogurt, granola and fresh fruit for breakfast, as well as a rotational assortment of entrée salads for dinner,” Koenig notes. “On evenings that we do not offer the entrée salad, we will always offer a mix of greens with an appropriate variety of toppings.
“Because this brand does drive 50% of the occupancy with extended-stay customers, it becomes increasingly important to offer variety,” Koenig says. “This is why we developed over 180 different recipe cards to support the breakfast and dinner offering.”
Koenig sees the evening meal program, specifically, as a differentiator. “While other brands are scaling back on their evening meals, Homewood is really focusing on our value proposition by ensuring our offerings are inclusive of a light entrée item and the appropriate side dish,” she says, noting that the majority of Homewood locations also provide complimentary beer and wine, subject to local laws.
Guest reviews have been positive, with “some nice bumps in scores,” Koenig says. And “F&B will absolutely remain a focus for 2010. As both business and leisure travelers are trying to maximize value in their trips, we feel we offer a true bundled product with a daily hot breakfast; dinner and drinks four nights a week; all-suite rooms; and other extras like complimentary Internet, pools, and fitness centers.”
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