Hotel business will always remain a profitable venture particularly in areas with bubbling nightlife and a high concentration of companies, organizations, firms, etc.

If you have the requisite capital and the necessary initiative, you can rest assured that a hotel business is one of the avenues you can establish as a lifelong income stream.

In this post, you’ll find out how to start a hotel and travels business in Nigeria.

1.Put a Business Plan Together

Basically, a hotel business is a formal venture and as such, you’ll need to put formalities in place by creating a business plan. Importantly, the business plan is a roadmap showing how your proposed hotel and travels business will be conducted. And in the instance that you’ll need external funds for starting the business, a professional business plan could be the recipe for attracting the interest of investors.

2.Work Out and Secure a Suitable Business Location

The location of your hotel business is of paramount importance simply because hospitality business requires a site with specific classes of people for it to thrive in the long run. In Nigeria, hotel business is best located in areas with bubbling nightlife as well as places surrounded by highbrow companies, organizations and tertiary institutions.

3.Erect Your Hotel Building(s)

Before you’re able to build the physical structures for your hotel business, you’re expected to have acquired a sizeable tract of land and obtained the necessary approval from the relevant ministry of land.

In erecting your hotel buildings, endeavour to have an architectural style that appeals to either the taste of your desired customers or the fancies of the people in your business location. Also, the construction of your hotel buildings should tally with the finishing, quality and style that speak to customers’ sense of appeal. This will cost you a lot of expenditure and obviously, trying to avoid necessary expenses can leave you with hotel buildings that hardly capture people’s fancies.

4.Register Your Hotel Business with CAC and NTDC

Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) is a well-known Nigerian outfit saddled with the responsibility of company registration. For a company to operate legally, its owner(s) is/are expected to have registered with CAC.

After registering your hotel business with CAC, you’ll have to also register it with the commission relevant to your business sphere. For hotel and travels, the Nigerian Tourism Development Commission (NTDC) is where you should consider.

5.Employ Business Staff

Hotel business is a hospitality venture and as such, it relies on the backbone of receptive staff for it to attract customers in the long run. As regards staff employment, you can either hire inexperienced persons who will be trained afterwards or simply employ experts such as bartenders and hoteliers.

In the instance that you’re satisfied with hiring inexperienced persons, you can make such persons undergo appropriate training at Abuja-based National Institute of Hospitality and Tourism.

Staff management is one important you should handle with great care as losing your staff might mean losing a specific portion of your customer base. This is because customer engagement in hotel business is based on the relationships between hotel staff and customers. Once certain workers leave a hotel, the customers they’ve attracted might stop patronizing the hotel.

6.Promote Your Business

It’s possible that your hotel business doesn’t begin to thrive early enough even after locating it in an industrialized or urbanized area. Should this be the case, you really have to promote your business by means of advertisement.

You may consider an advert mix involving billboard ads, TV ads and radio ads, all intended to announce the presence of your hotel to potential customers as well as remind them of this presence.

Conclusion

We hope this post has provided you with all that you need in order to start and run a hotel business in Nigeria. While hotel business constitutes the lucrative businesses in highbrow areas, you should always remember that favourable staff management is one of the factors that can earn you success in the business.