Bed and breakfast packages are the bread and butter for numerous properties around the world. Right now, they are a fantastic form of revenue and guest satisfaction, but there are two sweeping cultural changes that hotels will need to address in the decade ahead.
- The increasing awareness of the health benefits of intermittent fasting (IF) and reducing refined sugar products in the diet, for which breakfast is often the most condemned meal of the day because of its tendency towards simple carbs as well as it not fitting within most IF lifestyles.
- The grand shift of total traveler numbers from boomers and Gen Xers to millennials and centennials, with the latter camp increasingly health-conscious and incorporating newer trends like ketogenic dieting (no carbs), dairy-free, gluten-free or IF.
What’s a hotel to do in a decade’s time when their B&B offers are met with pure apathy by Gen Y and Gen Z customers? Better start planning for this future!
The prospects of going against the 20th Century gospel of ‘three square meals per day’ or the well-marketed myth that ‘snacking boosts the metabolism’ may seem like anathema to those raised on a decades-long routine of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Actually if you look at the history, people in the 19th Century and earlier never used to eat three square meals regularly nor have time to snack. Eating is identity, though, and some people here in 2022 may refuse to consider the evidence in favor of reducing the number of meals per day simply because changing one’s habits is admission of being wrong.
If you find yourself in this camp, a quick Google search on intermittent fasting will yield mountains of scientific papers and heaps more guidelines on how to incorporate it into your lifestyle. As we say to summarize all the biochemical processes, “You can’t fix a car with the engine on.”
Where this comes to a head is that there will be an increasing number of potential guests for which your B&B promotion or any other breakfast-incorporating package will fall on deaf ears. Moreover, you’ll start to get counteroffers where people will try to convert the breakfast component into a voucher that can apply to lunch or dinner. This would be hard to manage one-to-one in a labor crunch.
Right now, it’s all about flexibility. Breakfast is still meaningful, but there will be an inflection point some time within the next two decades where it no longer is. Part of our work as strategic planning consultants is to work with hotel owners to develop plans for this scenario.
Your B&B package needs a plan for this macro-trend. Behind it, you need software that can accommodate vouchers for any mealtime instead of only the morning. And behind that software, you need data to indicate how your guests’ behavior around breakfast is changing. How are ordering patterns changing in response to the trends around cutting dairy, wheat and simple sugars like artificial maple syrup or jams? How can you measure whether someone is on an IF diet so that you can personalize future offers?
These are big questions and perhaps too much for the current revenge travel summer. Indeed, just chew on it for later consideration or, actually, fast on it.
