Face to Face: Giacomo Battafarano, Hotel Xenia
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Boutique hotel openings are booming in London. Travel Daily caught up with Hotel Xenia’s general manager to find out what it’s like coming into the capital and what’s in store for the future.
Hotel Xenia has not been open long. Please provide us with an overview of the property.
The property was previously a hotel but was closed for 22 months and reopened on 8 May 2013.
It has been changed from a three-star property into a boutique hotel and since then there has been a great response.
The hotel has had occupancies of around 65% which is unusual for a new hotel and as such we are very happy. The property is still in its first year with the new boutique product and the reaction has been very enthusiastic.
What does this new ethos focus on?
It is not just about the new product and interiors but the quality of service, not being part of a chain and the attention to detail that we pay our guests. This is a five-star hotel but it is also a small boutique property and we have to show how much we care for people that stay with us. In the rooms it means we have to provide a comfortable bed; there are tablets in our rooms for room service and information and there is free WiFi throughout.
The facilities include two restaurants, a bar, meeting rooms and our underground multi-function room that is set up as a social space with a snooker table and small bar. We use this to show football matches, wine tasting sessions or cinema nights for our guests but it is open for free to them throughout their stays.
What can we expect from the hotel in the future?
We’ve just had a new chef join us named Andrea Angeletti who will help us drive forward our food and beverage offering. Angeletti is a Michelin star chef and joins us from the Marche region in Italy to roll out a new menu. It will focus on the quality of the products we bring into the hotel; we want it to be seasonal and fresh too. He will also invite other chefs from other countries to come over and develop special menus or events.
We’ll have a new team looking at the bar experience too with wine and champagne experts and our cigar bar concept will be developed; we have plans to have a calendar of events based around cigars from around the world.
One of our main strategies is to just generate more awareness of our name and become more well-known.
We will plan travel industry visits and press stays this spring so the industry can get an idea of who we are.
Our location in Kensington is so important with so much around us and there is great potential for us to grow our local and international business.
What are your key markets? Do you have plans to target new ones?
There is a great mix of clientele staying here, typically it is the British, American, Italians and French. As we are so new the focus will be in these established markets for now, but the hotel is accepting guests from all over the world.
There is a balance of corporate and leisure guests staying too and we have inter-connecting rooms so the hotel appeals to families too.
Competition in London is certainly a challenge so we have to try and take our share and get the right target to specific markets to distinguish through facilities, service and product.
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