“Breakfast is important to guests, and it’s almost integral, like location and price for the hotels,” said Gregory Miller, vice president of lodging and experiential leisure equity research for Truist Securities. “If breakfast ranks up above room experience, maybe the buffets are more meaningful than the bed. So, there’s really an incentive to put a lot of focus into the buffet experience because it appears that customers really care about it.”
That said, in a COVID-informed and hygiene-conscious world, what will become of the hotel buffet? It seems to depend on the hotel operator’s perspective.
Marriott Bonvoy has announced a new, rebooted breakfast concept at more than 150 hotels in North America, and its research showed buffets are okay. “The new complimentary breakfast program was developed and driven by customer feedback and insights,” said Diane Mayer, vice president and global brand leader for Classic Select Brands at Marriott. “Through our customer research, we learned that many of our guests expected a hot breakfast buffet to return, and over 72% of those surveyed felt comfortable eating at a buffet again. Furthermore, breakfast continues to be a top decision maker for our guests when it comes to selecting a hotel.”
The complimentary hot breakfast program was rolled out in Residence Inn, SpringHill Suites, Fairfield and TownePlace Suites, and a new breakfast program was also unrolled at Aloft Hotels that caters to the socially conscious and transient lifestyle of the next-Gen traveler, Mayer said.
Customers do really care about buffets, said João Martins, regional operations manager for Pestana Hotel Group in Portugal, who is in charge of Pestana Hotels & Resorts, Pestana Collection Hotels and Pestana CR7 Lifestyle Hotels. “Almost two years ago, when we started with this pandemic situation, the law said that the buffet was not allowed, and then some weeks after that first decision, they decided that you can have a buffet, but you need to serve the customers, and they had to book a time for their breakfasts,” he said.
Those first customers, Martins said, were really disappointed. “They were used to coming to breakfast at what time they wished, and in some other cases, customers felt it was a huge limitation to ask them (staff) to serve them,” he said.
Because it was a la carte, served to the tables, there was more waste, Martins added. “Customers felt bad because they didn’t always like everything that was served,” he said.