Is that a hotel or a store?
A few years ago, I was looking for small-scale furniture to fit a nook in our house, and found just what I wanted at a conference center. Unfortunately, they couldn’t sell it to me, and their distributor only worked with facilities, not individual buyers. Well, that’s all changing, according to this article from the Denver Post, which explains how hotels are now selling everything from robes to a $4,000 Ritz-Carlton bed set. The Broadmoor actually has turned this into a tidy profit center, with $500,000 annual room amenity sales.
From the article: “High-end hotels, coming off three years of record-low occupancies, have turned guest rooms into virtual retail showrooms, offering for sale nearly everything in the room.
“’It’s catchy, it’s new, it’s different,” said Robert Mandelbaum, an Atlanta director at PKF Consulting, a hospitality research firm. “But I don’t think most people think, ‘Oh, wow, let’s go buy hotel furniture.’”
I must be ahead of the times on this one—that’s exactly what I thought at that conference center. And I have often found myself lusting after various beds and armoires I came to know and love during a hotel stay.
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Related Topics: Hospitality news
