Viewpoint: We’re all going on a renovacation

Tired old seaside room stock can be transformed into hands-off and very lucrative self-catering apartments, says Andrew Easton

We’re seeing a rise in what I call the ‘renovacation’: the repurposing of tired three-star hotels and B&Bs into contemporary accommodation for self-catering with light-touch operations. It is reinvigorating seaside destinations and bringing travellers back to the British seaside.

So many British seaside towns are ripe for this opportunity. When I go on holiday I want something that is as good as or better than what I have at home, and three-star hotels and B&Bs in seaside towns just don’t deliver that. It’s a compromise in many ways. We are seeing a lot of demand for hotels similar to our sister property, Watergate Bay, but the supply of self-catering apartments has a long way to go to catch up.

Revitalising these properties not only increases the options for travellers, it is a chance to have a positive impact on the local economy. These are properties which have already been designated as holiday accommodation, so the change of use planning is minimal, and housing stock is not being lost in the same way as with some of the peer-to-peer lodging companies.

Many small hotels have a good square footage where you can easily make a decent one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette. Your guests aren’t going to be cooking Sunday dinner in it, just using it for occasional meals to feed children or to have breakfast, but it will have all the practical facilities needed to cook all week if they really want to.

The opportunity is there to connect with the local community: the local bakery or deli who can deliver a breakfast box or picnic to the property, or local guides who can take visitors on paddleboards, walking or coastal running. You can really connect your guests to the best of the local entrepreneurial spirit.

We’ve seen so many people leave hospitality over the past two or three years and the idea of the chef cooking breakfast or an evening meal for everybody in the B&B is over, but working in an ad hoc way gives them the chance to work for themselves rather than for an hourly wage, and it gives them the foothold to grow their own business locally.

Because you’re running a very light operation, the key performance indicators look good, if not better than a hotel. You’re not having to feed people or employ bar staff. You can use technology to make those important connections to create memorable experiences, such as to the yoga teacher who runs the morning workout on the beach, or to create running routes along the coastal path that are easy to download, and using WhatsApp, text or Messenger to communicate with guests.

We can look after guests, but remotely. Guests don’t always want to see the owner when they’re on holiday, they just want to know that the lightbulbs will be replaced or the name of the chef who will make them a meal at sunset.

Technology can also take on the distribution and selling through dynamic pricing and revenue management. We can look at occupancy and be sure that we’re getting every penny we can from each room. But not just that, investors and developers have a destination management service that we’re providing. Everything is covered, so put your feet up and just watch the cash rolling in. And that’s something you could never say if you owned a hotel.

Andrew Easton is the managing director of Beach Retreats