A hotel is a building made of small independently controlled zones, most of which are unoccupied most of the time. Heating, cooling and lighting a sold room for twenty-four hours when the guest is in it for eight is where the waste sits, and no amount of efficient fittings fixes a control problem.
The operator, with the brand standard sitting over them and dictating what a room may look like.
An efficient fitting in a room nobody is in still wastes everything it draws. The distinctive measure in a hotel is linking room services to whether the room is sold and whether the guest is currently in it: key card or occupancy-linked power, setback temperatures on unsold rooms, and a housekeeping routine that does not leave everything running.
This is why hotels often get a better return from controls and building management than from relamping, which inverts the usual order on this site.
Guest-facing space is constrained by brand standards and by what a guest will tolerate. Back of house is not. Kitchens, laundry, plant rooms, corridors, car parks and plantrooms run long hours, nobody is photographing them, and the equipment is frequently older than anything a guest sees.
That makes back of house the natural starting point: it is unconstrained, the hours are long, and the work does not interrupt trading.
Lighting in a hotel is atmosphere, and atmosphere is part of what is being sold. Replacing warm, low-level, carefully designed lighting with efficient cool fittings will save energy and damage the product. Brand standards often make it impossible anyway.
The workable version is matching colour temperature and dimming behaviour exactly, and treating the lighting design as fixed while the technology behind it changes. Expect to pay more per fitting than an office would and to need samples signed off.
Hotels refurbish on a cycle, floor by floor, and a floor out of service is the cheapest moment to do anything. A programme that waits for the refurbishment cycle costs a fraction of one that interrupts trading, and the capital is already being spent.
If a refurbishment is scheduled, that is the conversation to be having now rather than afterwards.
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One commercial contractor, quoting off a survey of the actual building rather than a rate per square foot over the phone.
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