Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood

Drawing on exclusive data from the TOPHOTELPROJECTS construction database, we examine how coronavirus is affecting Hard Rock’s hotel development pipeline.

With over 200 venues – including cafes, hotels, casinos and live music venues – spread across more than 70 countries, Hard Rock International (HRI) has been hit harder than most by the truly global nature of Covid19.

It was Americans Peter Morton and Isaac Tigrett who opened the first Hard Rock Cafe in London 1971; the inaugural Hard Rock Hotel & Casino duly followed in Las Vegas in 1995. But the innovative hospitality company, which has been owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida since 2007, has surely never faced a challenge quite like this before.

Today, Hard Rock Hotels has 29 hotels and hotel/casinos featuring more than 16,000 rooms in total, with sites across North America, South America, Europe and Asia, though many are currently closed. It’s behind several high-profile brands, including Hard Rock Hotels, Reverb by Hard Rock and Hard Rock Residences, and has been expanding rapidly in recent years.

Here, we consider the current state of HRI’s hotel development pipeline to try and get a snapshot of how coronavirus is impacting on the Florida-based company’s growth plans.

Hard times for Hard Rock

By diving into the TOPHOTELPROJECTS construction database, we can see that HRI has 25 active projects, with five more on hold and none cancelled as of 10 June 2020.

Of these 25 live schemes, no fewer than 23 fall under the world-famous Hard Rock Hotels & Casinos flag. The remaining two are earmarked for Reverb by Hard Rock, the select-service hotel brand designed for modern music lovers.

What does this mean for the hospitality industry?

It’s important to stress that the Covid19 crisis is evolving rapidly, particularly in the Americas where HRI has a significant presence, so nothing’s set in stone. We also need to be wary of attributing every decision to put a hotel development project on hold down to coronavirus, since of course plenty of schemes stalled even before the pandemic.

Nevertheless, the fact that five out of six HRI hotel projects around the world are still progressing may provide some comfort to those working in the wider hospitality industry – it’s not as though the company has downed tools on every development by any means. If the countries in which it operates manage to suppress the spread of coronavirus, the music-oriented business appears to be banking on its forthcoming properties striking a chord with many more travellers over the coming years.