The Aberdeen Altens Hotel

The need to cater to a wide audience

Altens is the largest hotel in Aberdeen — there's a need to cater to a wide audience. Although well maintained, much of the interior was tired and operationally awkward. This is a very common situation in many older hotels and owners spend a lot of time trying to target capital expenditure to deliver a return on this key part of the investment cycle.

Ica understand this dilemma and try to use design and operational knowledge to ensure there is a return on investment when a hotel is refurbished. We even put our money where our mouth is, and as co-owners of Altens, we like to invest our pension fund in hotels so we can learn alongside hoteliers the challenges and opportunities of making that investment and seeing a return.

The refurbishment focused on reconfiguring two restaurants and a bar. This corrected some of the flow issues at busy times, but more importantly created a new hub for Altens with welcoming design to transform the identity and positioning of the hotel.