Half of all global travellers now book their restaurant reservations before they book their flights. Let that land for a moment. Not before they check hotel availability. Not before they compare room rates. Before their flights.

The data comes from JLL’s Hotel Restaurant Report 2025, and if you work in hotel ownership or development and it doesn’t make you rethink your entire F&B strategy, I’m not sure what will.

We are living through a fundamental restructuring of what hotels are for — and what drives their commercial performance. The restaurant is no longer an amenity. It is no longer a nice-to-have. For an increasing number of properties, particularly in the luxury and resort segments, it has become the commercial engine that everything else runs on.

I’ve spent four decades in this industry. I’ve built restaurants from scratch, developed franchise models for celebrity chefs across the UK, and spent the better part of two decades matching world-class restaurant brands with hotels across Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. What’s happening right now is not incremental evolution. It is a revenue revolution — and the hotels that don’t grasp it will be left explaining to their owners why they’re still competing on room rate.

The Numbers Are Telling a Clear Story

The financial case for branded, concept-led F&B is now beyond dispute. JLL’s research found that hotels with celebrity chef restaurants or prestigious dining awards charge, on average, 8.8% more in average daily rate than comparable luxury properties — and generate 18.6% more revenue per available room.

That is a substantial premium. And it accrues not because the restaurant itself necessarily drives enormous direct profit, but because a great dining identity repositions the entire property.

Meanwhile, CBRE’s 2025 data shows F&B revenue per occupied room growing at 3.8% — outpacing total hotel revenue growth of 3.0%. In luxury and resort assets, food and beverage now accounts for between 35 and 45 percent of total property revenue. At some destination resorts, that figure approaches 50 percent.

The industry’s obsession with RevPAR — revenue per available room, based solely on room sales — is increasingly a rearview mirror metric. The operators winning right now are measuring total revenue per available room: rooms, F&B, events, spa, all of it together. In that calculation, the restaurant is often the single biggest lever you have left to pull.

How We Got Here

The hotel restaurant’s poor reputation didn’t happen by accident. For decades, it was earned. The generic hotel restaurant — safe menu, indifferent service, aimed squarely at guests who couldn’t be bothered to go out — became an industry cliché because it was, in thousands of properties, an industry reality.

Hotels ran restaurants as a cost centre, staffed them accordingly, and treated any surplus they generated as a bonus rather than a target. Part of this was structural: a general manager whose career has been built around room yield and RevPAR is rarely equipped to think like a restaurateur. The skills are genuinely different.

Part of it was also a failure of ambition. For years, the prevailing wisdom was that hotel guests were a captive audience who would eat wherever was convenient. That was never entirely true, and it is emphatically not true now. Today’s luxury traveller will walk ten minutes to a restaurant with a genuine identity rather than spend an evening in a hotel dining room with a laminated menu and a wine list that hasn’t changed since the refurbishment.

Identity First, Not Menu First

What changed — and what the most successful operators have understood — is that the question to ask is not “what should we put on the menu?” It is “who are we, and who is eating here?”

The brands that have genuinely transformed hotel F&B performance share a common characteristic: they built identity before they built a menu. Nobu Hospitality didn’t expand into hotels by accident. The Nobu name carried a culture, an aesthetic, a set of expectations — and when that name went above a hotel door, it repositioned everything beneath it. Guests come for the restaurant. They stay for the rooms.

Soho House built an entire hospitality empire on the same principle, with the added twist of exclusivity. The food and beverage ecosystem — restaurants, bars, rooftops, events — is the product. The rooms are part of it, not the other way around. Cipriani did it through heritage and private club culture.

Different approaches, same underlying logic: the dining concept is the brand, and the brand drives the revenue. This is not complicated in theory. In practice, it requires hotel owners to think differently about what they’re buying when they commission an F&B operation. They are not buying a chef. They are not buying a menu. They are buying a concept.

The Partnership Model

One of the developments I’ve watched with great interest over the past decade is the growth of the branded restaurant partnership model — where a hotel owner licenses an established restaurant identity, bringing in a proven concept rather than building one from scratch.

The case for this approach is straightforward. You are not starting from zero. You are importing an identity that already has recognition, a trained team model, an operational playbook and — critically — a story that the market already knows how to tell.

I’ve seen this work transformatively in hotels that, by any objective measure, should have been unremarkable. A decent-but-forgettable four-star property in the right location, given the right branded restaurant, can fundamentally alter its competitive position. It changes the conversation with guests. It changes what the property can charge. It changes the reviews. And it changes how the local market relates to the hotel — because now the restaurant is a destination for people who will never sleep there, and that external traffic lifts the entire business.

The Hotels That Will Win

The industry is at an inflection point. Room rate growth is moderating in several markets. New supply is coming through in others. The easy RevPAR gains of the post-pandemic recovery are behind us.

In that environment, the hotels that will pull away are the ones with a genuine F&B identity — a dining concept that gives guests a reason to choose them specifically. The ones that will struggle are the ones still treating their restaurant as overhead, staffed to minimum viability, with a menu designed by committee and a concept that no one could describe in a sentence.

The good news for hotel owners is that you don’t have to invent this from scratch. The restaurant brands that have built genuine global identities are actively looking for the right hotel partnerships. The right deal, properly structured, brings the hotel immediate credibility, an operational model and a revenue uplift that justifies the investment many times over.

The question is not whether to take F&B seriously. That argument is over. The question is how quickly you move, and who you choose to move with.

Francis Carroll is the founder of Luxxe Hospitality, an international F&B advisory specialising in placing world-class restaurant brands and culinary talent into hotels and mixed-use developments across Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. He has four decades of experience across 500+ projects in 20+ countries. luxxehospitality.com