The Future of Hotel Design + Guest Experience: What’s Trending for Public-Facing Spaces?

A significant shift is underway for how we use spaces for living, working, relaxing, and socializing. This transformation extends into the hospitality industry, where trends now emphasize flexible, adaptable, and resilient hotel spaces that prioritize connectivity, physical health, and cognitive well-being. Public-facing areas in hotels are crucial for enhancing the guest experience and defining the hotel's identity, serving as the first and last impressions for guests and often acting as key community hubs during travel. Designers play an essential role in understanding modern guests and setting new standards for spaces that inspire and delight.

Today's guests are more multigenerational and diverse, traveling for business, celebrating personal leisure, exploring a new city to satisfy a life change, or a local visiting their favorite neighborhood spot. To meet these varied needs, hoteliers are incorporating flexible programmatic elements into public spaces. These areas should celebrate flexibility and multifunctionality, accommodating remote workers, nomads, and multigenerational travelers.

Hotels must provide spaces that facilitate both privacy and social interaction, accommodating the rise of remote work and the need for community engagement. Design solutions include the creation of flexible workspaces equipped with technology and comfortable seating, interactive communal areas such as rooftop lounges and co-working spaces, and private options such as private pods or quiet zones for focused work or personal downtime.

Travelers seek authentic, immersive experiences that connect them with local culture. Hotel design must reflect this desire by offering unique, culturally rich environments. Elevated mixed-use lobbies that can serve as an interactive social hub with various types of activations like pop- ups or art installations. Design solutions incorporating local art, crafts, and design elements provide guests with a sense of place. Experience-driven spaces that facilitate unique activities such as cooking classes and guided tours, along with storytelling through design, engage guests on a deeper level.

Moreover, the concept of wellness extends to the lobby environment as well. Business travelers can now find spaces designed for both productivity and relaxation, acknowledging the blurring lines between work and leisure travel. Adaptable spaces with ambient lighting, and noise-canceling features to ensure a tranquil environment. Healthier building design practices continue to be the expectation. For example, incorporating biophilic elements into the interior design intentionally, the increase of natural lighting, natural ventilation, indoor gardens, organic building materials, views of nature and water, and various art mediums to help us connect with nature.

Designing forward, public spaces in hotels that foster multipurpose programming that can transform from work, to socialization, to wellness and everywhere in between are key to a memorable guest experience.

Ready to future-proof your hotel design and stay ahead of the trends? Reach out to our hospitality experts and say hello to learn more about our approach to hospitality design at hello@bergmeyer.com!