How Many Keys is Too Many for One Property?
By Isaac French
I’m writing to you from Mexico City. Helen, Lucas and I are here for 24 hours. We’re staying at an amazing 19-room boutique hotel called Casa Polanco. This spot is right up there with the best, and it’s a timely reminder that you don’t need a ton of keys to operate a truly excellent, experiential hospitality property.
Casa Polanco in Mexico City
In fact, as I’ve said before, the invisible threshold for me is ~45 keys. Once you go beyond this in one setting, you rapidly lose the magic of the place.
Amangiri is 38 keys.
Babylonstoren is 35 keys.
The Newt in Somerset is 40 keys.
Heckfield Place is 45 keys.
(those last 3 places I recently stayed at on our South Africa/Europe trip. My full write up is forthwith coming)
Babylonstoren in South Africa
These are all world-class hotels, and all of them felt perfect. Casa Polanco is a classic boutique hotel—in the city—and therefore has less of a landscape component as the others I just referenced, but 19 rooms feels perfect for this setting.
What do I mean by that? It feels like being in your best friend’s stylish home. The hospitality from the staff has been excellent, too. 5-star in every way.
So what is it about this max 45-key number?
You just can’t offer the same intimate, truly personalized experience to your guests when you add more.
Last year, on the same trip we stayed at Amangiri, Helen and I stayed at Four Seasons Santa Fe, aka Rancho Encantado. I had just read the compelling book telling the story of the brand by its legendary founder, Isadore Sharp, and I wanted to experience a Four Seasons myself.
Rancho Encantado in Santa Fe
At 65 keys, this is one of their smallest properties worldwide. It’s a spectacular spot, but something didn’t feel quite right. And I think it was the size. It was just too big. Too big to feel at home. Too big to feel that intimate vibrancy found in those other spots.
I’m not complaining—it was an awesome experience and I doubt most others would have had the same impression. But I could feel it. It really did feel different.
Onsite F&B necessary?
One of the big factors when deciding key count is, of course, what minimum number of keys is necessary to support at least one 5-star restaurant, bar, spa(?), etc… Those are critical for a property that can command rates north of $600/night, right?
Not always.
How far you are from other worthy options for discerning guests plays a big part. Live Oak Lake is 15 minutes or less from plenty of great restaurants, so onsite F&B wasn’t necessary.
Offering gourmet grilling meal-kits or the like could be a great no-overhead solution (with a tasty experiential element as well). Or of course, you could always partner with a private chef for pre-scheduled dinners cooked for your guests who chose that.
There are options here. The point is that you shouldn’t let the tail wag the dog when it comes to deciding how many units is perfect for your dream and for your setting.
Staff-heavy or -light?
There are plenty of noteworthy distinctions between a Live Oak Lake property, and an Amangiri, but they both do capture a certain intimate feeling—among other things—that contributes to the magical moments of our guests’ experiences.
And they’re easier to stay on top of, too.
Maybe the largest elephant in the room that I’m not explicitly accounting for is the traditional luxury vs modern experiential approach to staffing. This can be a huge topic, and my friends Richard Fertig and Ben Wolff have both opined on this both more and better than I, so I suggest you follow them and listen to what they have to say.
Basically, the long and short of what many of us believe is that the genre of experiential hospitality we’re passionate about no longer includes the excessively staff-heavy, excellent but sometimes overbearing, approach to hospitality.
The generation of guests we’re catering to cares more about uniqueness, experience and autonomy than formal service excellence and overall 5-star luxury orthodoxy.
I believe the trick is to find the perfect balance between “right there when you need us, but never in your way” and total independence and privacy. It’s one of those tensions between the traditional STR and hotel, as we’ve talked about before.
Of course I love being pampered at a 5-star hotel like the one I’m at every now and then. It’s an amazing, totally-worth-it experience. But that’s not precisely the property I’m set on creating. I want something with less overhead. And smaller, too.
My dream project, generally speaking, is 5-20 units. That’s a real sweet spot I think. And the best part is that this is an extremely approachable undertaking for those of us with little experience and fewer resources.
Building my first property at 7-units was more out of lot size and financial restrictions than some calculation of perfect key count. But it was the perfect size for what it is.
Live Oak Lake in Waco, Texas
Property type (trees, topography, other natural features), proximity to local F&B and other amenities, and your approach to hospitality staffing are all contributing factors to consider when determining how many units/keys to build.
45 is my don’t-go-above threshold.
20 is my personal dream size.
But these aren’t hard and fast rules, of course. You have to do what feels right to you. If you think about it, has key-count played a role in your experience staying at different hotels or resorts?
—Isaac