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Hey 👋
You've just opened Hotel Nuggets, a not-boring newsletter for hoteliers.
This month, I spent 2 weeks exploring Barcelona and the Costa Brava with my family and noticed some hotel nuggets worth sharing with you!
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#1 The bakery that happens to be a lobby
One hotel I wanted to visit in Barcelona was Praktik Bakery. I didn't sleep there, but I loved seeing what they did with the ground floor.
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Instead of a traditional hotel lobby, you walk into a beautiful bakery selling fresh bread, pastries and coffee. It's also where hotel guests have breakfast.
The counter also serves as the hotel reception.
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I love this concept for several reasons:
- Extra revenue: The bakery serves hotel guests but also attracts paying customers from the street.
- Local connection: Instead of being an isolated space for tourists, the hotel becomes part of the neighborhood.
- Atmosphere: A busy bakery full of people, the smell of fresh bread and the sound of a coffee machine create a much more relaxed welcome than a typical hotel lobby.
Of course, this concept won't work for every hotel, especially some upscale properties. But for a 3-star city hotel, I think it's a fantastic idea.
And it doesn't have to be a bakery. It could be a café, a flower shop or something completely different.
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#2 Just follow Mickey Mouse
In Barcelona, I stayed at the SLS Hotel and visited their bar, Kyara.
One of the best hotel bars I've ever experienced: the music, lighting, interior design, atmosphere. Everything was spot on.
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But one small detail caught my attention.
The bathrooms are quite hidden, and it's not obvious where to find them.
Instead of putting up boring directional signs, they placed a huge Mickey Mouse statue pointing towards the bathrooms.
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You can see Mickey from almost anywhere in the bar.
Whenever someone asks the bartender where the bathroom is, the answer is simple: "Just follow Mickey!"
Such a clever way to solve a practical problem while adding personality to the space.
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#2.5 A hotel idea you can’t stop thinking about?
Maybe it’s a small hotel you’d love to buy. A few cabins on a piece of land. Or a coliving space you keep mentally designing when you should be doing something else.
I write another newsletter called Niche Hospitality, where I explore these kinds of businesses: glamping, offsite venues, longevity hotels, detox cabins and other hospitality concepts built around a specific audience.
If you enjoy Hotel Nuggets and want to explore what you could build next, you might enjoy this one too.
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#3 Feed the birds, fade the traffic
I visited one of our hotel partners near Barcelona, and had a long chat with Clara, the host.
The villa is a beautiful oasis in the middle of an industrial area, right next to a highway. Once inside, you can forget about the surroundings. Until you hear the traffic.
Clara had an idea: attract songbirds to the garden.
She built several feeders, but the first guests were pigeons. They helped themselves to the entire buffet.
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After some experimenting, she found that switching to smaller seeds attracted the little birds without feeding the pigeons.
And sitting in the garden, I could hear the difference. The birdsong made the highway noise much less noticeable.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how a hotel looks, but when you read the reviews of any hotel, negative feedback is often about things you don't see in the photos: smell and noise.
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#4 Don’t let the bill be the goodbye
After we checked out of a hotel on the Costa Brava, the receptionist handed us two bottles of water. We hadn’t asked.
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Simple, cheap, and somehow memorable.
The timing was what made it work.
Hotels put a lot of thought into the welcome. Two bottles of water can put a little thought into the goodbye.
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That's it for today!
Cheers,
Peter from Hotel Nuggets
How did you find this edition?
👍 YES - I liked it
😑 MEH - Average
👎 NO - Almost no value
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