Acceptable in the 80s: why hotel stock is reaching a critical moment

Rob Harris, director in our building services engineering team in our London studio, has decades of experience advising design teams and developers behind hotel development across the UK. 

Here, he share’s why the industry faces a critical moment for retrofit and refurbishment, and the opportunity it brings to unlock value, improve climate resilience and future adaptability, and have a greater positive impact:

A significant portion of the UK’s hotel stock is reaching a tipping point. Many hotels that were built or substantially upgraded in the 1980s or 90s are now reaching the end of the design life for their core building services. 

A lot of the systems that keep a hotel operational, such as pipework, controls and distribution, installed back then were expected to last around 40 to 50 years, meaning much of it is coming under increasing pressure. 

The growing role of hotels for placemaking and community

This comes at a time of financial headwinds, when maximising the value of a hotel asset is more important than ever. For hoteliers I’m speaking to, there’s a real move away from solely relying on income generated from room rates, which are inevitably at the mercy of peaks and troughs in occupancy levels. Instead, many are pivoting their sites towards working harder for the community and wider place, which in turn helps increase footfall, visitor spend and brand loyalty. 

From London to Kent, Harrogate and beyond, ‘community-focussed’ schemes are popping up, complete with added terraces, restaurants, coworking facilities, spas, gyms, swimming pools and padel courts, to boost engagement and dwell time. 

This critical moment therefore presents both an opportunity and a challenge. The need to keep hotels operational often drives short-term decision-making, and the issues that that creates are not always immediately visible. Over time, systems can become layered on top of systems, new ceilings installed below old ones or walls built in front of redundant fittings, as just a few examples. Patching happens because it’s often cheaper and less disruptive, but avoiding the underlying issues inevitably makes them more costly to remediate in the long run.

While that approach can keep rooms available in the short term, it creates long-term risk. And when a major refurbishment finally becomes unavoidable, the true complexity of the building is revealed.

This matters because renewal is no longer just a technical maintenance question, it is becoming central to asset value. An inefficient hotel, with high water consumption or limited adaptability may become more expensive to operate and less attractive to buyers, funders and operators. In a market where energy performance is increasingly treated as a marker of quality, the gap between a future-ready hotel and a stranded asset is widening.

Retrofit as a strategic repositioning move

Now is the time to use refurbishment as a strategic repositioning moment, not just a short-term fix. The most important first step to doing so is to understand what is already there. A good engineering strategy starts by asking, what is sound, what can be reused and what needs to adapt to support the next phase of the hotel’s life? 

It also assesses the role of a hotel in placemaking and how it interacts with its wider environment. It’s about bringing the right experts, from building services engineers to structural and civil engineers, sustainability and climate risk consultants and more, all together as early as possible.

And it’s about designing for future adaptability. It’s the perfect opportunity to consider whether modular elements can be included, so a building can be adapted to meet future demand, as we have at Campfield Market in Manchester, where our structural engineers created a non-intrusive mezzanine floorspace that isn’t attached to the existing frames of the historic building, allowing it to flex over time. 

Or it might mean drawing up a strategy so that risers and services routes be accessed without major disruption, in case of future works. Design teams can assess whether the building can accommodate an extra floor, like we have at The Elephant, the large-scale retrofit of Oxford Street’s former House of Fraser, or a new wing, spa or roof terrace, to maximise value.

Climate resilience should also be part of the conversation. Upgrading services offers a chance to reduce energy and water demand, improve comfort during hotter summers, and avoid oversizing kit simply because the building fabric has not been addressed. In hotels, even small specification decisions, from shower flow rates to the simplicity of controls, can have a major operational impact.

It’s high time to look under the bonnet, as it were, and understand the real condition of assets, and make decisions that protect operational performance, long-term value and guest experience.