Sunny side up

Breakfast, so the saying goes, is the most important meal of the day. If you’ve visited a full-service hotel over the past decade or so, it’s hard to disagree. Offering mountains of bread, acres of bacon, refillable coffee and maybe even a mimosa or three, many hoteliers have long seen breakfast as central to their operating model.

As one head chef in London recently noted, the morning meal brings in over a third of the property’s F&B revenue. Guests, for their part, are just as enthusiastic.

According to a 2022 study by TripAdvisor, 65% of the customers claimed they picked their hotel based on the breakfast option, while 83% see breakfast as central to a positive experience. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic forced many operators to dramatically cut back. Between social distancing and special cleaning protocols, the extravagant buffets of old suddenly went from indulgent fun to worrying disease vectors. And with room occupancies crashing to just two in ten hotel rooms, according to STR, it made little sense to put on a feast every morning. At the same time, these difficult circumstances inevitably led to more austere breakfast services. Many full-service hotels exchanged four types of eggs with cardboard boxes of croissants and coffee, bringing them more in line with their mid-range competitors. And with the post-pandemic labour market continuing to squeeze margins, there are signs that some properties are sticking to this more simplified style even now.

Not that Covid has necessarily condemned hotels to becoming Starbucks with a turndown service. On the contrary, with guests desperate for excitement after years of staring at the wall, experiential breakfasts are on the rise, with chefs the world over crafting wildly innovative ways of starting your day. That’s shadowed by more personalised service, with many operators, especially in towns and cities, eager to lure guests away from the countless breakfast opportunities beyond the hotel doors. Not that any of this is easy. Rather, the best hotel breakfasts post-pandemic require thoughtful interaction with customers. Get it right, though, and profits could soon be pushed higher.

Breakfast and furious

What did hotel breakfasts look like before 2019? In broad terms, explains Alex Susskind, the divide can be understood by how much guests were paying. Full-service hotels almost invariably boasted ample morning spreads, something the Cornell food and beverage management professor describes as “differentiators for their brands”. In essence, that meant the luxurious buffets we’re all familiar with, or else à la carte options at top names like the Four Seasons. But as Susskind continues, that’s only half the story, stressing that less posh hotels have long relied on pastries and coffee alone. Albert Rothman, vice-president of food and beverage at EOS Hospitality, concurs. Especially in big city hotels – where guests are likely to rush out early for business or sightseeing – Rothman says some up-market properties long ago started abandoning meat-heavy breakfasts in favour of “quick service” alternatives.

In other words, the pandemic arguably pushed hotel breakfasts not to some unprecedented new world, but simply closer to the cheap-and-cheerful approach many operators were already following. Even so, the scale of the shift shouldn’t be underestimated. Examining a couple of major brands is illuminating here. At some Hilton properties, for instance, sit-down breakfasts were dumped for pre-packed yoghurt and bagels. Elsewhere, staff simply gave guests a $10 voucher to buy something elsewhere. Operators went the same way. IHG broadly went down the grab-and-go track, while some Marriott hotels cooked breakfasts. It was a similar story at EOS Hospitality, where Rothman helps manage a number of hotels across the US. “There’s a desire for high touchpoint luxury service within our portfolio and balancing that with safety,” he says, adding that his team hung bags with cheese and fresh pastries on bedroom doors.

Egg-celent ideas

Visit Amanjiwo, set amid the palm groves and rice paddies of central Bali, and you might be surprised by the breakfast setting. Certainly, you can have your breakfast in the hotel restaurant, but more adventurous guests are increasingly plumping for the so-called ‘floating breakfast’ – swapping plates for a bobbing wicker basket and a table for a private swimming pool. Allowing customers to eat as they wallow, Amanjiwo’s technique is being echoed across East Asia, with hotels from Thailand to the Maldives getting in on the action. Nor is the floating breakfast alone in pushing the boundaries of what breakfast can be. With the pandemic giving hotel F&B insiders a chance to reset their culinary portfolios, other properties are trying something different too. At the Four Seasons in New York, for instance, chefs soon hope to integrate sushi-style conveyor belts into their morning routine.

How to understand this slew of experiential breakfasts? For Susskind, it comes down to the time of day that breakfast is served. Think of it like this: both business travellers and tourists are likely to be away at lunch, while most tend to eat out for dinner. But if you’ve just rolled out of bed, stumbling towards breakfast at your hotel often makes sense. “You have a captive audience,” says Susskind. “So, offer them something that will keep them in your hotel – in full service and luxury hotels, that’s additional revenue for you.” And if not everyone is paddling towards floating breakfasts, other operators are channelling the same spirit. Among other things, Rothman says that EOS Hospitality occasionally tries to serve busy guests coffee as they wake up, delivering it 20 minutes before they go to their morning meetings.

Yet even as companies like EOS Hospitality are experimenting with personalisation, Rothman also stresses that some of 2020’s tactics haven’t disappeared. One particular focus here is room service. For obvious reasons, eating away from other guests enjoyed a resurgence during Covid. EOS has stuck to this outlook until now, working with Think Package, a custom package design company, to deliver “quality” breakfasts in a box. Clingfilm wrapped muesli and half-stale muffins are gone – replaced by robust, compartmentalised packages complete with coasters and information on what guests are eating. Even better, Rothman emphasises that customers can easily dispose of their leftovers once they’re done, sparing them the frustration of sharing their suite with a pile of dirty dishes, and making them more likely to skip the cafe down the street.

Beyond appealing to guests, meanwhile, this pared-down approach makes monetary sense. Many hotels are still recovering from the financial hit of Covid, while labour costs increased by 6.9% in the year to September 2021 as found by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. It goes without saying that following the Think Package model can save money here. As Rothman puts it: “You’re not having to enter [a guest’s] room and set up a table, and then retrieve everything.” Susskind makes a similar point. Describing this type of offering as “room service lite” he says that operators are increasingly “capturing revenue, and providing customers with decent, high-quality types of products” without going all out. Look at what hoteliers are doing and this point seems fair. Many Radisson properties, to give one example, now boast in-room coffee machines, helping guests get their obligatory cup of joe without needing to rely on staff.

Eating out

What, then, does the future hold for hotel breakfasts? Between the poolside bonanzas at the Amanjiwo and the unadorned approach favoured at EOS, it’s tempting to imagine that traditional breakfast spreads, the erstwhile titans of the hotel breakfast world, have vanished forever. Eventually, though, Susskind speculates that they may return. To explain what he means, he talks by analogy, explaining that at a recent hotel stay in New Jersey, he noticed staff coming in to clean out his bin and replace used towels, something they never did during the pandemic. To put it another way, he says, customers are again “becoming a little more comfortable” with the world that was, with sumptuous sit-down breakfasts high on the comeback list too. “It’s the cost of doing business in the luxury side of the segment,” he says, “that you have to provide for it.”

Rothman makes a similar point, claiming that in a way, Covid and its consequences may actually prompt the revival of old school breakfasts. With 30% of the British workforce now working remotely at least once a week, according to data from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN), and similar numbers of their American cousins doing the same, Rothman suggests there are new opportunities for hospitality F&B growth. Now that many workers have more flexible schedules, or indeed work from anywhere, he argues that putting on “interesting” breakfasts could draw in new diners who aren’t even staying at a particular hotel. “There are more people who are able to have leisurely breakfasts,” he says. “That would be a great thing for the industry.” Given where hotel breakfasts were 18 months ago, that’s surely something to cheer.

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