Experiential In-room Dining Is The New F&B Frontier

From specialised private dining to a taste of local and seasonal cuisines and chef’s unusual preparations—in-room dining has emerged as the perfect marketing and revenue generating tool to upsell the F&B offerings, garnering loyalty and helping hotels ace the art of hosting

- Madhulika Dash

Of the many charms of checking into Hyatt Regency Lucknow is the in-room Lucknow Gazette. This tiny 1980-styled newspaper, which offers a road map of Lucknow and chalks out the famous places to eat at, comes with an assortment of goodies in a welcome kit. The kit holds a note on the culinary experiences that the chef can curate with a little ‘advance notice’. The bonus add-ons: some ‘unhotel-like’ dishes such as Tokri Chaat and Malai Makhan (a closer cousin to Daulat ki Chaat) as little treats.

The idea, says Executive Chef Subhash Jana, “was to create this little treat box that not just showcases the city but also the culinary team (and their capabilities) to guests. While we nudge them to explore the city in their free time, this little welcome kit is a gentle reminder that we can create the same experience for them, while they relax in their rooms.”

This clever move by Chef Jana has, in the past few months, attracted guests who come purely to experience the little Lucknow the hotel’s culinary team helps create (and even customise) in their room.

Chef Jana is representative of a group of chefs who have introduced similar initiatives at their hotels as part of the In-room Dining (IRD) experience. Increasingly, an upscale IRD experience puts a hotel in a completely different F&B league.

IN-ROOM DINING AS A REVENUE GENERATOR

Krishan Aggarwal, VP–Hotel Openings, IHCL terms IRD as not just a “value addition tool but a revenue generation concept as well.” In fact, adds Aggarwal, “As a concept, it is central to [the experiences offered by] great luxury properties. At the recently opened Taj Aravali Resort & Spa, Udaipur, we use IRD or the Villa Dining concept to benchmark indulgence for our guests and associates. It is a great tool to market not just the surroundings but also our restaurants.”