Boutique Hotels: A special tourism opportunity

So you don’t want to be caught up in the hustle and bustle of city life, but instead you want to be locked away on a large property that will still allow you the opportunity to be captivated by the intimate settings. A boutique hotel sounds like just the thing.

The concept of boutique hotels was created around the 1980s, or at least these properties earned the title around that time. The idea was to distinguish smaller hotels with their unique offerings and elements of intrigue from larger scale properties.

“It’s more than the size or number of rooms; it’s the architectural design, the style and how they are put together in the space that they are located, and how well they are connected to a kind of lifestyle community,”  said Paul Salmon, Chairman and CEO of Rockhouse Hotel.

He said “These hotels do relatively well because they are really aspiring to meet the needs of the traveller, people are looking for more connection to the place they are going to and for a tailored experience, and a better design. Boutique hotels tend to realise all their needs.”

Rockhouse, one such example, is said to be one of the most beautiful locations in the Caribbean according to visitors. It is at an amazing location in the coves on the cliffs of Negril, with the best bungalows that one could find.

Salmon said, “We team the beauty of the property with a bunch of other offerings for our guests. We have three restaurants and a pool bar that runs through the day time. We have an incredible spa, a separate bathhouse overlooking the Caribbean Sea, and the remote locations on the cliff house where you can have your massage done.”

What makes the offerings great, is the fact that great emphasis is placed on ensuring workers are happy.“Most of all we have an amazing team. We have 170 staff for the 34 rooms we have there, and they are really focused on service and a range of things we do on the property like the organic farm and the wood work shop that makes all the furniture for the rooms. It is really a scaled operation… but we make sure we put our workers as number one.”

With small hotels such as Jakes down on the south coast, Chris Blackwell’s Hotel, Strawberry Hill, Geejam, The Cliffs, and the Skylark, Salmon said he is hoping for great things for the tourism industry in the future.

“There’s a lot of places with this boutique hotel genre and they are doing an excellent job, they have gone the extra mile to create what today’s travellers are looking for. You can only get a Jamaican experience if you come to Jamaica, we encourage our travellers to go outside and experience what the country has to offer.”