Pizza franchises Pizzeria Uno and Boston’s Pizza Restaurant and Sports Bar are among the restaurant concepts looking for new ways to operate and attract consumers whose dining habits changed during the pandemic, and they’re turning to hotels to do it.
Boston’s already has a handful of restaurants open in hotels, with its first in a Holiday Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas. “It’s gone extraordinarily well,” President Jeff Melnick said. The brand also has a partnership with a Four Points by Sheraton hotel in Yuma, Arizona as well as a Deadwood, South Dakota, unit in a Wyndham hotel.
Melnick, who leads the U.S. affiliate of Canada-based Boston Pizza, said Boston’s sought a nontraditional opportunity it could take advantage of and found one in the hotel space, where hoteliers look at their restaurants as space that loses money or hardly makes any. Many try to create their own concept, or they have a flag concept that consumers find unappealing.
“Bringing in a reputable brand and putting it in their facility not only helps them make the hotel itself more attractive, which helps them fill rooms, but it also allows them to be the franchise partner,” Melnick said. “They have more control.”
Boston’s also handles catering for the hotel, Melnick said.
For Boston’s, the appeal is largely the exposure the brand receives from all the foot traffic in hotels, Melnick said. The majority of Boston’s 400-plus locations are in Canada, where it has wider brand recognition, something it’s still working to build in the United States.
The investment required to open a Boston’s Pizza in the United States ranges from $1 million to $2.76 million for traditional stores.
Two of the first three hotels Pizzeria Uno converted were in the midst of a remodel anyway, so they needed to add Uno’s signature pizza ovens and some other supplies, but the restaurant space was already there. Uno’s hotel locations are in Chicago, Detroit and northern Indiana. The first of the hotel conversions opened in March in a Comfort Suites near the Chicago O’Hare Airport.
“I’m not convinced that what we asked them to do was materially different than what they were probably going to spend anyways,” CEO Erik Frederick said. “And that’s what really got us thinking that maybe there’s others.”
Uno’s Detroit hotel location is in a Delta by Marriott hotel, and the Indiana location is under the Wyndham umbrella.
The franchise was founded in Chicago, and is currently headquartered in Boston. It has 100 locations in 20 U.S. states, Honduras, Saudi Arabia, India and Qatar.
Frederick intends to turn those three hotel restaurants into 100 hotel restaurant locations by the end of 2024—not just with conversions, but also with new construction, he said.
The revenue that these hotel conversions bring in is “phenomenal,” Frederick said.
Sales are doubling compared to previous hotel restaurants because of all the streams of revenue, from hotel guests, local traffic and delivery.
“I’m sure you’ve stayed at a hotel where you see all this takeout pizza coming in the front door, and it’s coming from some local place,” Frederick said. “Well, now they get that revenue.”
And hotel operators are already in a franchise system that’s focused on hospitality, which was a major appeal of the conversions, Frederick said.
The investment needed to open a Pizzeria Uno franchise ranges from $503,500 to $1.24 million for a fast-casual unit, and from $1.2 million to $2.5 million for a full-service store.
Read more about Uno’s hotel conversion model in the February issue of Franchise Times.