Is 'Mega Boutique Hotel' an Oxymoron - By Harry Nobles & Lisa Jackson
In a September 2001 article we discussed the question: 'What is a Boutique Hotel?' In that article we mentioned the number of rooms as one factor that has an impact on the correct usage of 'boutique'; we even speculated that 100 rooms might be the upper limit. Things certainly have changed in five years. There seems to be no upper limit at this time.
We subscribe to ConstructionWire.com, and almost daily, I see hotels with plans calling for 200.-300.even more rooms, yet being called “boutique” by the developer.
We have recently visited several very large hotels, some with 2,000 rooms or more, and were pleasantly surprised to find that the combination of genuine staff cordiality, personalized service, and attention to detail resulted in a level of guest service delivery that we thought impossible at a mega-hotel. In that atmosphere one could almost forget that there were three to four thousand other guests in house, presumably experiencing the same level of service at the same time; the operative word here is “almost”.
