Every hotel revenue manager has a comp set. Five to seven carefully selected properties, similar star rating, similar location, similar room product. STR report arrives monthly. RevPAR compared. Pricing adjusted. Meeting concluded.
The F&B team has a comp set too. It usually consists of the other hotel restaurants nearby. The brasserie at the Sofitel two blocks over. The rooftop bar at the boutique property that opened last spring. The all-day dining room at the Hilton on the main square.
That is the wrong comp set. And building strategy around it is one of the most expensive mistakes in hotel F&B.
Your guests are not choosing between hotel restaurants
When a guest staying at your hotel decides where to have dinner tonight, they are not opening a spreadsheet of comparable hotel F&B operations. They are asking a simpler question: what is the best option within fifteen minutes of here?
That question has no category filter. It does not exclude independent restaurants. It does not weight hotel venues more favourably because the guest is already checked in. It includes the neighbourhood bistro that has been full every Friday for six years, the natural wine bar that opened eighteen months ago and already has a three-week wait for Saturdays, the Japanese restaurant with nine tables and a Michelin recommendation.
Those are your competitors. Not the brasserie at the next hotel along. Benchmarking your F&B operation against other hotel restaurants gives you permission to be mediocre in a different way. You are comparing yourself to operations that share the same structural problems — the marble pricing, the concept designed for nobody, the team trained to manage allergens rather than sell. Winning that comparison tells you almost nothing useful.
The comp set that actually matters
The right F&B comp set is built by thinking like a guest, not like a revenue manager. Start with a ten-minute walk. Every restaurant, bar, and cafe a guest could reasonably reach from your hotel on foot or by a short taxi ride. That is the candidate pool. Not just the ones with similar star ratings. Every credible option a guest might choose over eating at your restaurant tonight.
From that pool, select five to eight venues that share your guest profile. A business hotel guest comparing lunch options has different reference points than a leisure guest planning a celebratory dinner. The comp set shifts by daypart and occasion — and the best operations track both.
For each venue in the set, you want to understand: — Menu and pricing: what are they charging for comparable dishes, what is their price range, where does your pricing sit relative to theirs? — Positioning and concept: what are they famous for, what is their signature, what kind of guest are they attracting? — Digital presence: Google profile quality, photo recency, review response quality, menu accessibility. — Review sentiment: what do guests love, what do they complain about, are there patterns? — What they are doing that you are not: sharing formats, a signature cocktail, a lunch offer that fills the room on Tuesdays, a wine list with a point of view.
The dangerous comfort of hotel-to-hotel benchmarking
Here is why the wrong comp set is so persistent: it is reassuring. If your restaurant is performing similarly to the Shangri-La or Marriott two blocks over, the business case for change is weak. The owner is satisfied. The GM has no urgent problem to solve. The F&B team continues managing within the parameters of a benchmark that sets the bar at institutionally acceptable mediocrity.
Meanwhile, the independent restaurant around the corner is full. It has a two-week wait on weekends. It is appearing in every neighbourhood dining guide. Its average check is ten euros higher than yours. Its review scores are a point and a half above yours on Google. Its team has been there for three years because the culture is right and the tips are good.
That restaurant is not in your comp set. It should be the north star of it.
What changes when you get the comp set right
Pricing decisions become grounded. Instead of asking whether your main course prices are in line with a comparable hotel restaurant, you ask whether they are defensible relative to the independent restaurants your guests are actually comparing you against. Sometimes this reveals you are underpriced. More often it reveals you are overpriced for the experience being delivered — which is a different and more urgent problem.
Menu development gets a direction. When you know what your real competitors are doing well, you stop building menus in a vacuum. The gaps become visible. The neighbourhood has no serious natural wine programme. The Japanese option three minutes away has a two-hour wait every Thursday — is there an occasion you could serve that demand? A comp set analysis is essentially a map of the market's unmet appetite.
The digital gap becomes undeniable. Running a hotel-to-hotel comparison of digital presence produces a field of equally neglected profiles. Running a hotel-to-independent comparison often reveals a stark and uncomfortable gap. Independent operators manage their Google presence, their Instagram, their review responses with more urgency — because their livelihood depends directly on it. Seeing that gap clearly is the first step to closing it.
Service standards get recalibrated. The best independent restaurants in any neighbourhood have been forced by competition to develop genuine hospitality — warmth, knowledge, attentiveness — as a survival mechanism. Benchmarking against them sets a higher and more honest standard than benchmarking against another hotel with the same structural training gaps.
What the leading chains already worked out
The major hotel groups have already acknowledged this problem — just not out loud. When Marriott launches Eat Around Town — a programme letting Bonvoy members earn loyalty points by dining at over 20,000 independent restaurants that have nothing to do with Marriott — they are making a quiet admission. They know their in-hotel restaurants cannot always win the dinner decision. So they built a system to stay relevant when guests walk out the door.
Hilton has taken a different approach — building genuine culinary credibility through partnerships with chefs including Jose Andres, Nancy Silverton, and Heinz Beck, and through a collaborative dinner series with the James Beard Foundation at luxury brand properties. The goal is the same: make the hotel's dining offer feel like a destination, not a default. Hilton Honors Dining mirrors Marriott's model — points earned at partner restaurants whether guests stay at a Hilton or not.
Accor has gone furthest structurally. Through its Ennismore joint venture, the group acquired a portfolio of lifestyle brands — Gleneagles, The Hoxton, Mondrian, SLS — where the F&B offer is the product, not the amenity. The ALL programme rewards members when they dine at Accor restaurants and bars outside of a hotel stay entirely. The F&B is no longer contained by the hotel. It is the reason to engage with the brand at all.
Four Seasons, Rosewood, and Shangri-La have leaned into the resident chef model — named culinary figures with genuine profiles, building menus and programmes that would be credible in any independent context. The pattern is consistent: every group that has made progress stopped treating F&B as a support function for room revenue and started treating it as a product worth building a reputation around. Most individual hotel restaurants have not made that shift.
How to build it — practically
No expensive tool required. No STR subscription needed for this exercise.
Walk the neighbourhood. Every venue within a fifteen-minute radius that a guest might reasonably choose. List them. Eat at them. Not as a mystery shopper with a checklist. As a guest. Order what a first-time visitor would order. Notice what the server says when they hand over the menu. Notice what the table next to you ordered when they saw someone else's dish. Read their reviews. Not just the score — the language. What words do guests use repeatedly? What moments do they describe? What are the complaints and how does the team respond? Map the pricing. For each category — starters, mains, desserts, by-the-glass wine, cocktails — note the range from lowest to highest. Where does your pricing sit? Does the gap correlate with the experience gap? Update it quarterly. The neighbourhood changes. A restaurant that was average eighteen months ago may have changed chef and become the most talked-about room in the postcode. A static comp set is a comfort blanket, not an intelligence tool.
The question the right comp set forces you to answer
Once you have built an honest competitive set — one that includes the best independent operations your guests are actually choosing between — one question becomes unavoidable: why would a guest eat here instead of there?
Not why they might. Not why they theoretically should. Why would a specific guest, who has just checked in, looked up their options, and is about to make a decision — choose your restaurant over the ones genuinely competing for their cover tonight?
If the answer is because it is convenient — that is not a competitive position. That is a default. Defaults erode. The guest who chooses you because it is easy will leave a three-star review when the experience does not justify the price. If the answer is a specific, defensible reason — a dish, a programme, a service style, an experience that exists nowhere else nearby — that is a competitive position worth building on. The comp set does not give you the answer. But it tells you whether you have one.
Ready to act on this?
Start your competitive auditWritten by a senior F&B leader with 25+ years operating and consulting across Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Aselios is built on the same analytical framework used across hundreds of venue audits.