Recognised as Best Hospitality Advisory Firm – Africa and for Branding & Development Excellence at the MEA Business Awards 2025, our services are designed to deliver new standards in strategy, development, branding, and operationally smart solutions, ensuring sustainable growth for clients.
InnSight Advisory provides nine areas of hospitality advisory delivery to owners, developers and funders across Africa, the Indian Ocean Islands and the Middle East. Most engagements combine several of them. Below is what each covers, when owners typically need it, and what you receive at the end.
We guide owners through the development of a hospitality asset, from concept to master planning to opening. The work covers conceptualisation, master development planning, project management on the owner’s behalf, alignment of brand and operating requirements with architectural and interior design, site and environmental investigations, design and planning support for FF&E and OS&E fit-out, IT and financial infrastructure, and development management delivery, including coordination of the professional team.
Setting the foundation for any greenfields or major refurbishment project is critical. These studies, ideal for funding motivations, include:
We advise on transactions, market entry and operator arrangements. That includes market-entry strategy and deal sourcing, operator selection, management contract negotiation, brand strategy recommendations, acquisition due diligence, market demand studies, feasibility analysis and investment advisory.
Management contracts are where owners most often concede value without realising it, in performance tests, termination rights, territorial protection and the treatment of central costs. We negotiate these terms regularly across African and Indian Ocean markets and know which are genuinely standard and which are simply asked for.
InnSight provides experience-led management financial pro formas over ten-year periods, that inform abilities to deliver management returns, service debt or provide decent equity return on investment that can be expected. Particular deliverables are:
We develop hospitality brands and the marketing that carries them. The work covers curated brand development, investigation and implementation of international brands into franchise environments, brand positioning and storytelling rooted in the property’s location, branded guest journeys mapped to brand standards, marketing plans with the resourcing to deliver them, and content, digital marketing and online distribution alignment.
The central question for most African owners is whether to stay independent or take an international affiliation. There is no universal answer. It depends on the market, the segment, the fee load and how much distribution the property can generate on its own. We work that question through with evidence rather than preference.
We build profit improvement plans and the commercial capability to deliver them, including commercial team structuring and mentoring, revenue management strategy covering pricing, distribution and channel management, and sales and revenue growth strategies.
Profit improvement plans are among our most requested engagements, usually where occupancy looks healthy but the margin does not. The causes are rarely mysterious: rate structures that have not moved with the market, channel costs nobody has audited, a conference offer priced below its value, or a team without the tools to trade. We identify what is not being done, or prepare basic or innovative route-to-market solutions to deliver results.
We work inside operations to improve guest experience and commercial performance, covering service excellence, curatorship and audits, food and beverage strategy and concept development, staffing structures and optimisation, and set-up and optimisation of branded residences, mixed-use property and rental management structures.
Food and beverage is where many African hotels lose most and could gain most. The right offer for the market, priced properly, staffed correctly and executed consistently, changes a property’s economics; the wrong one absorbs management attention indefinitely.
We act for owners in overseeing the performance of their assets, through property improvement plans, P&L forecasting and management performance review, CAPEX planning and financial risk management, business turnaround and restructuring, and management efficiency checks.
Owners who employ an operator still need someone reading the numbers on their behalf. Asset management is that function: holding the operator to the plan, testing whether capital spend earns its return, and giving the owner an independent view of performance.
We help hospitality businesses build environmental and social performance into their operating model rather than bolting it on, through eco-conscious hospitality practice, community engagement and impact strategies, and sustainable tourism development.
In much of Africa this is now commercially decisive. Funders test it, international brands require it, and the tour operators and corporate buyers who fill rooms increasingly ask for evidence rather than intent.
Alongside these nine areas, for owners who want independent oversight on a continuing basis, we offer an Owner’s Advisory Retainer across three levels: Essential, Professional and Premium, each with its own deliverables. We would be glad to talk you through the options in each, and the time saving and performance upside they can bring, without you carrying that capability in-house.
.
