Cliste Hospitality has partnered with Fáilte Ireland on the inaugural delivery of its F&B 360° programme, bringing General Managers from across our client hotel portfolio through a programme focused on one of hospitality’s most persistent commercial challenges: converting strong food and beverage revenues into sustainable margin. More than 50 tourism businesses participated in the first intake nationally, with our client portfolio already reporting improvements across revenue and profitability, procurement and labour efficiency. The programme combines detailed business diagnostics, expert mentoring and practical commercial tools across areas including menu engineering, workforce planning and operational efficiency, with participating businesses receiving €10,000 worth of tailored support.
For Cliste Hospitality, the value extends beyond participation in the programme itself. An important part of our role as a hotel management company is connecting the businesses we manage with specialist expertise and industry partnerships, and then using the scale of our portfolio to translate that knowledge into commercial action. Working with Fáilte Ireland has enabled our General Managers to combine external F&B expertise with Cliste’s own commercial and operational oversight, interrogating each hotel’s performance individually and looking beyond topline revenue at the factors determining the margin ultimately reaching the bottom line.
As Daniel Cross, General Manager of Radisson Blu Hotel & Spa Sligo, explains:
“Although we were already operating with strong systems and processes in place, F&B 360° gave us the opportunity to step outside the day to day, bring in external expertise and look at our operation through a different lens. The programme has helped us make better use of our data, focus on areas such as menu engineering and identify opportunities for continuous improvement. What’s really encouraging is that we’re already seeing measurable results, including a €2 increase in average spend year-on-year, and an increase in guest satisfaction.”
As our General Managers complete the inaugural F&B 360° programme this month, the focus now moves from programme to performance, embedding individual commercial roadmaps into hotel operations, measuring their impact and sharing successful interventions across our wider managed portfolio. F&B performance is ultimately a whole-business discipline: menu mix, pricing, labour deployment, procurement, productivity and guest experience all influence the economics of an outlet, and improving margin requires those decisions to be managed together. With Fáilte Ireland now opening applications for the second intake of F&B 360°, the first cohort provides an important example of what can be achieved when industry expertise, hotel-level data and operational execution are brought together around one of hospitality’s most challenging areas of performance.
