Your Guests All Want the Same Thing, Says This Hotel Food and Beverage Consultant — Here's What Auden Hospitality founder Scot Turner discusses prioritizing authenticity and curated experiences in hotels, improving food and beverage programs and leaning into digital storytelling.
By Shawn P. Walchef Edited by Jessica Thomas
Key Takeaways
- Hotels can stand out against their competition by adapting to new trends and new customer interests and by thinking outside the box.
- Restaurants inside hotels skip most of the overhead costs of independent restaurants based on the partnership deal.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
There is power in the details. In the high-stakes world of hotels and hospitality, guests speak loud and clear about what they want.
Scot Turner is the founder of Auden Hospitality, a consulting agency founded on the belief that hoteliers and restaurateurs are wired differently.
After 15 years in luxury hotel food and beverage programs, Turner found his way to independent restaurants. It was there that he realized the opportunity for hotels to take some pages from restaurants' playbook. Now, all he had to do was start his own company to build a bridge between the two worlds.
Related: To Make the Perfect Cocktail, You Need Collaboration. It's the Same When You Own a Restaurant.
Turner's time working with luxury hotels taught him valuable lessons. Incubating countless brands to grow, scale, franchise and exit showed him food and beverage programs of all shapes and sizes. Turner focuses on relationships to revolutionize hotel experiences: hotel-to-restaurant, restaurant-to-local partners and always to their guests. The partnership holds all the potential.
Restaurants can build their business with minimal costs in hotels, where the majority of their customers are always in the building. Hotels can leverage restaurants to drive guests to book rooms. Restaurants then have easy access to a constant supply of potential customers, making marketing much easier.
Turner told Shawn Walchef of Cali BBQ Media that if a hotel can offer a stellar experience under one roof, then everyone wins.
His advice to hoteliers and restaurateurs alike is to carefully curate every detail of your guests' experience. People curate their own lives, down to their personal soundtrack for every activity. Make your hotel food and beverage concept stand out from the crowd.
Storytelling is the secret
Every hotel and restaurant has a story. Whether new or old, a brand should tell its story as often as possible. Turner has learned first-hand how valuable that is.
One of his more recent projects was a 5,000-member golf resort in England called Fox Hills — and the first project went so well that the company kept him on for a second one. This time, Auden Hospitality focused on a stately English manor building as the centerpiece of the facility.
Creating a concept that emphasized history while bringing a vibrant new dining experience to the English countryside wasn't easy. The company had to think boldly about how to show its client's journey to the world.
Turner has shared his own journey through social media in the past several years. After starting Auden Hospitality, he simply began posting what he knew about the hotel food and beverage game.
Connections grew, and now Turner is cranking up the heat on video storytelling, leveraging YouTube for him and his clients. A mutual friend from Cali BBQ Media's Rising Tides Live series, Richard Liverman, lives by the mantra "Don't be boring." Auden Hospitality takes that mantra to heart to outpace its competition.
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Hotels and restaurants are finding new ways to use these tech tools to tell their stories. Restaurants like Fallow in London and chef Adam Byatt of Trinity are booking tables because of their social media content. They make great videos showing the world how to cook and even give away recipes. Sure enough, guests come flooding to the restaurants to try the real thing because their home-cooked version wasn't quite there.
We live in a digital age. With many travelers being much younger, restaurants and hotels would do well to cater to their interests. Tell the world about yourself with video content as often as possible, and you'll have those seats filled with new guests in no time.
"If you're not going to do something properly, don't do it at all," Turner says. "Hand it over to people who are the most passionate."
It's okay if your organization lacks the skills or resources to create a specific experience — partner with people who can. Don't sacrifice the opportunity. Whether you're planning fine dining, an outdoor cocktail lounge or anything else, getting the right partners on your team can make anything happen.
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