68 | Apartment style point of difference Quest Apartment Hotels are catering for the growing demand for apartment style living. Quest Apartments Hotels (NZ) Ltd: Lambton Quay DEVELOPMENT Virginia Wright evan@dimonddesign.co.nz The largest by geographical spread hotel operator in NZ, Quest Apartment Hotels expect to have 42 locations by the end of March 2023, assuming the four most recent additions are finished as expected. “We’re everywhere people need to be to do business,” says Adrian Turner, Group General Manager of Quest Apartment Hotels (NZ). While still a hotel in the sense that they’re accommodation providers, their defining feature is to appoint every one of their units as an apartment; complete with the usual bed, shower, toilet and so on, but with the addition of an oven, a microwave, a hob, a washing machine, a drier, “so that you can be in control of your stay rather than having to use the facilities of anywhere else. If you stay in a normal hotel you won’t have any of that.” summarises Adrian. It’s a point of difference that is serving them well with the demand for apartment style accommodation seeming to surpass that for more typical hotel rooms. “85% of our business is domestic-corporate, so the traveller who’s working for Vodafone, for Spark, for the government, or Joe Bloggs travelling round New Zealand to see his suppliers or his customers,” explains Adrian. “93% of all businesses in New Zealand are classed as SME’s, or Small to Medium Enterprises, with on average less than 20 people working for them. “A large proportion of those people travel, and when they travel they want to be comfortable.” Quest Apartment Hotels take care to make life easy for those travellers. They may not want to stay at a higher priced hotels or spend money eating at the often expensive restaurants within them, but if they don’t want to cook for themselves, Quest have charge back arrangements with many of the local eateries. “So they can go to the café over the road the next morning for their breakfast, charge it back to their rooms and they only have one bill when they leave the property,” says Adrian. All of Quest’s owner-operator franchisees live locally so alternatively guests can order a breakfast pack, or if they’re staying longer they can order a pantry shop and have their basic cooking needs supplied as required. The four fundamentals underpinning Quest’s business haven’t changed much in their 24 years: to be the accommodation provider of choice, to be the franchise of choice, to be a good Small to Medium Enterprise themselves, and, given that they don’t own their buildings, to be the tenant of choice. All of their new Quests go into new buildings with long term leases signed with the developers involved, many of whom they’ve worked with before. They’re always looking for the next area where there might be an unmet demand and have another six or seven locations lined up beyond the ones they’ve already announced. “... so that you can be in control of your stay rather than having to use the facilities of anywhere else. If you stay in a normal hotel you won’t have any of that.” Their model seems to be working given that they’ve opened five new properties despite two years of Covid disruption. The newly opened Quest 256 Lambton Quay, their first new property in central Wellington since 2015, is a case in point. Its 54 apartments include a mixture of studios, one, and two-bedroom apartments, carefully designed to meet the needs of short or longer stay travellers, whether they’re there for business or pleasure. “It’s been a huge success, it’s been full most nights and it’s paying off the work that went into deciding the market was there,” says Adrian. Quest now have seven properties in Wellington and with the new Tukina Event Centre due to open next year they are looking forward to providing exactly the sort of accommodation they think its visitors will want to stay in.
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