The Club Hotel & Spa: Making it all add up
Owner Lawrence Huggler admits that he was quite late in setting up an effective marketing strategy after opening the Club Hotel & Spa. Although the business community took to it straight away, and the leisure trade has been good at weekends, he now wants to focus on increasing the leisure trade in time for the summer season.
One of the key aims of the hotel has been to bring a new market to the island, so Huggler has been in discussion with local food businesses about creating partnerships to attract a more food-conscious clientele.
One idea is for guests to visit the famous Royal Bay oyster beds. "Guests would eat the oysters in Bohemia [the hotel's fine-dining restaurant] and then have guided tours of the beds at low tide the next day," he says. "Not many people have ever visited oyster beds and these are some of the best oysters in Europe."
Huggler is convinced that interest in "food tourism" is growing, and believes Jersey is ideally placed to exploit it.
Another idea is for chefs from Bohemia to take guests on tours around Jersey's main fish market, complete with lunch at the Atlantique Seafood Bar, a restaurant by the market where customers choose their own fish, the chef cooks it and it's served simply with a glass of wine.
Huggler has also forged links with the island's La Mare Vineyard, which produces wine, sparkling wine, cider and a local speciality called Jersey Black Butter. This is a non-alcoholic preserve made from cider apples, liquorice and spices which is served on toast. Handmade chocolates from the Vineyard are also left in the hotel's bedrooms. "It makes people want to explore the island, visit the Vineyard and have a look around," he says.
Again this is all part of Huggler's vision of Jersey's tourist trade. "Jersey still caters for the bucket-and-spade brigade and bus tours," he says. "That market will still come to the island, but it wouldn't want to come to the Club hotel."
He does, however, want to tap into the perceived luxury and prestige that Jersey boasts. Another partnership is with Aurum Jewellers, which makes bespoke jewellery. Huggler is offering hotel and spa packages for brides-to-be, say, who might come to the island to choose a ring made for a discounted price by Aurum. To promote the idea, he has organised a competition to win one of these packages with a bridal magazine.
Huggler won't be able to tell how these marketing strategies perform until the end of the summer, because he has no figures to compare them with from last year. In fact, Huggler hasn't been able to do much meaningful benchmarking for any of the hotel's figures.
"I can and do come up with performance targets, but I have to put my hand on my heart and say that I'm slightly making it up," he says. "I can look at other hotels' rack rates and special offers, but it's hard for me to find out their achieved rates."
The Jersey Tourism Department does produce figures, he says, but they're two months out of date when published and, the department admits, are "guesstimates". Moreover, hotel consultants that produce revpar figures don't have enough of a market reach into Jersey to assure accuracy. As the Club hotel is a new beast for Jersey, comparisons become even more difficult.
For these reasons, Huggler is philosophical about adopting a flexible approach. "It's hard to have a marketing strategy for something so fluid," he says." We need to allow this to evolve."
The story so far
The Club Hotel & Spa was opened on 21 August by Lawrence Huggler. His family already owned the site's freehold through its St Helier printing business, but it still took £7m to get the project off the ground. This included the fine-dining restaurant Bohemia, which opened in 2003 and won its first Michelin star last year.
Looking ahead, Huggler hopes the hotel will record a gross operating profit of between £750,000 and £850,000.
