Business type
Boutique guesthouse
Location
Barcelona
Areas of work
Revenue · Product · Repositioning · Investment
Working together since
2016
Size
19th-century manor house
A 19th-century manor house in the Eixample. Continuing to optimise prices on the same product had its limits.
ABAL Stories
Transforming a standard guesthouse into a boutique bed & breakfast.
The story of this project, told by the people who lived it. With Lorenzo López, owner of Hostal Girona.
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The starting point
The product had to improve to change its capacity to generate revenue.
Hostal Girona had been operating for years in a 19th-century manor house in the heart of Barcelona's Eixample. It had something hard to replicate: location, history, architecture and character. But the product no longer allowed it to capture all the value the property could offer.
When Hostal Girona came to ABAL in 2016, it was already working with a Revenue Management consultancy. Our conclusion was that continuing to optimise prices on the same product had a ceiling.
The building retained unique elements of its history —including the old spaces through which carriages once entered—, but it needed to adapt to the expectations of today's traveller. The opportunity lay in preserving that identity and combining it with a more comfortable, functional and better-positioned product.
The question was no longer just how much to charge for a room. It became: what would have to change in the product for the market to be willing to pay more for it?
What we saw
The transformation had to improve the business without putting the business at risk.
The location and character of the building made it possible to aim for a higher positioning, but getting there meant working on different parts of the experience. Rooms, common areas, services, image, communication and commercial strategy all had to evolve together.
And there was a second condition: the transformation had to be economically viable for the owner. Closing the property for a major refurbishment would have meant giving up revenue and considerably increasing cash requirements.
The decisions
A progressive transformation over three years.
We proposed a progressive transformation of the property over three years, carrying out the different phases mainly in low season. This reduced the opportunity cost of having rooms out of service and allowed the property to keep generating cash while it was being transformed.
- Full refurbishment and upgrade of the rooms
- Optimisation of the common areas
- Introduction of a buffet breakfast service
- A shift towards boutique positioning
- Professional photography able to convey the new product to the market
- A revenue and distribution strategy consistent with the value being created
Product, investment and revenue had to evolve together. Each phase was planned with its financial impact and the business's capacity to absorb the investment in mind. Improved results made it possible to recover the investment in each phase before tackling the next, so the transformation could continue without halting the property's activity.
The result
+206%
Revenue. 2026 (year to date) vs same period in 2016.
+102%
ADR. 2026 (year to date) vs same period in 2016.
The growth did not come from adding more rooms. It came from increasing the value of the existing ones and getting the market to recognise it.
An ongoing relationship
The collaboration began in 2016 and continues today.
ABAL still manages its Revenue Management and works with the property on new decisions about product and online reputation. Over these years, the business, the product and the market have kept evolving. So has the strategy.
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