Hotel construction and closed-season refurbishment

The closed season is shorter than it looks

On paper you have November to March. In practice the usable window is smaller at both ends: the property has to be emptied, surveyed and stripped before anything starts, and it has to be cleaned, commissioned, snagged and dressed before it opens. The actual construction window in a five-month closed season is frequently under four.

That compression is why hotel work is a different discipline from private work. On a villa a three-week slip is an irritation. On a hotel it is a delayed opening, cancelled bookings and a commercial loss far larger than the value of the works.

Indicative for a mid-size refurbishment. Yours will differ; the ordering logic will not.

Ordering before the design is finished

This is the single most useful thing we can tell a hotel owner. The programme is not usually lost on site — it is lost waiting for sanitaryware, glazing, joinery or a specific tile that had a ten-week lead time and then missed a sailing.

So we identify the long-lead items in the first month and order them against a frozen sub-set of the design, while the rest of the specification is still moving. It requires committing to some decisions earlier than feels comfortable. It is also the difference between opening on the announced date and not.

Working next to rooms that are occupied

Phased refurbishment — half the hotel trading while the other half is a site — is possible and is often the only commercially viable option. It changes the method substantially.

• Noise-generating work is confined to agreed hours and, in practice, to periods when adjacent rooms are not sold. That has to be agreed with the operator before it is priced, not after.
• Dust and route separation matter more than the work itself. Guests will forgive scaffolding; they will not forgive dust in a room or a corridor they cannot use.
• Material movement has to be scheduled around guest movement, which on a caldera-side hotel with a single stepped access route is genuinely the hardest logistical problem on the job.
• Deliveries and waste removal frequently move to early morning, which affects both cost and the crew you can staff it with.

What refurbishment usually turns out to be

The brief is normally "refresh the rooms". What the strip-out finds is normally one of four things, and none of them is decoration.

• Waterproofing. Terraces and wet rooms above occupied space, detailed years ago without movement joints or a separating layer. This is the most common finding and the most expensive to defer.
• Drainage capacity. A property extended twice on a drainage system sized for the original. Peak occupancy is when it announces itself.
• Electrical loading. Air conditioning, induction, EV charging and pool plant added incrementally onto a distribution board that was adequate in 2004.
• Corrosion at balustrades and fixings. Salt-air degradation of anchors and hardware. Cosmetic-looking, structurally not.

We survey for all four before pricing, because a refurbishment that discovers them in January cannot absorb them.

Licensing and compliance

Physical works on a tourist accommodation property interact with its licensing. Changing room counts, altering fire escape routes, adding a pool or converting space to food and beverage all have consequences beyond the building permit.

A good contractor coordinates with your licensing consultant rather than replacing them, and makes sure the as-built matches what the licence assumes — which is precisely where properties that have been extended informally over the years get caught. See tourist accommodation licensing and legalisation of unauthorised structures.