INVESTING IN OUR HOTELS

As the digitalisation of hospitality becomes increasingly more important, and we make significant investment into the omni-channel experiences for our guests, the ALH team understands that our venues must match this market-leading offering.

“First class venues go hand in hand with our technological advancements,” Head of Format Operations, Shaun Dunleavy says.

“And the more we understand our customers, through the use of our digital channels, the more insight we have into the types of venues they expect from us.”

Portfolio management is an area of exciting opportunity for ALH and one they will be actively leaning into over the next one to three years.

“We have an extensive property portfolio and deploy a large amount of capital in this space every year. But, excitingly, there are a number of opportunities to optimise what we do and drive significant value for our guests in the process.”

ALH approach to hotel investment

Capital Planning

ALH’s approach to hotel investment can be categorised simply into seven areas of focus - two of which are unique to ALH. These can be broken down into two main categories - Sustaining and Growth.

“Sustaining covers a whole range of things from repairs to renovations, to updating and renewing gaming machines,” Shaun explains.

“When it comes to Growth, we’re looking at things such as hotel acquisition, large scale redevelopment of venues, property redevelopment rights through to investing in digital capabilities, loyalty programs and advanced analytics.”

“The spending on our network to date has led to a position where our hotels have an average ‘age since last investment’ in excess of eight years; catch up spend is required to reduce this.”

Over the next three years, Shaun explains that the renewal program will touch 20% of the fleet each year to enable investment of both high growth and sustaining ‘catch-up’ capital.

“This is a careful balance to maintain our great momentum, whilst transitioning to a customer-led model,” he says.

Our Investment Cycle

Over the last 12 months, over 50 renewals have been completed and you’ll see even more this year as the team places guests at the centre of format innovation and design.

“As we look to the future, our approach to renewals will increasingly leverage our Group capabilities with Endeavour-wide collaboration - this includes people, marketing, design, operations, finance and product,” Shaun says.

“As I’m sure you can imagine, this process is complex, so we break the investment cycle down into three stages.”

1. Renewal Strategy and Ideation

• Format development enabled by group-wide collaboration.

• Approach captures customer and team needs, business strategy and evolving global trends.

• Strategy is then defined and the ideation cycle begins (Innovate, refine, commercialise, iterate).

2. Select sites and define program

• Select sites based on criteria, including financial performance, and age of fleet.

• Site walks: Assess capital required, customer offering, and size of opportunities.

• Balanced program business case.

3. Execute renewals, monitor performance and leverage insights

• Go through the process of execution (Design, plan, build, land)

• Measure performance

• Leverage insights for future investments: What worked and where?