This piece comes from the hotel architects at Klic Arquitectos, and it looks at what a full hotel refurbishment actually buys you — and what it costs you while the works are on.
Tourism is Spain’s largest economic sector, and the Costa del Sol takes a healthy share of it. Demand has risen year on year, and so has the supply of beds. That, in one line, is the argument for refurbishment on this coast. A tired hotel does not lose its guests overnight. It loses them one review and one rate cut at a time.
The advantages of a full hotel refurbishment
A partial refit — new mattresses, fresh paint, a bit of colour in the lobby — buys you two or three seasons. A full hotel refurbishment is a different exercise: you open the building up, deal with what sits behind the plasterboard, and reset the asset. These are the arguments that usually justify it.
Gaining usable space
The aim is not more square metres. It is better ones. Rooms replanned around the bathroom core, corridors that stop wasting a metre and a half, a lobby that earns its floor area instead of just filling it. Andalucía adds a layer here that catches out owners used to the UK: hotel accommodation is governed by its own regional decree on hotel establishments (Decreto 47/2004), which sets minimum standards for guest rooms — direct natural light and ventilation to the outside or to a ventilated courtyard among them. In an older building with a deep floorplate, that decree, not your architect, decides how many keys you end up with. Worth checking before you count rooms on a plan.
Renewing the services behind the walls
Water, power, gas, drainage, heating and cooling. A full refurbishment is the one moment when replacing all of it costs less than replacing it in pieces. Old pipework comes out before it splits or blocks, the drainage is put right rather than patched, and underfloor heating becomes an option because the floors are up anyway. It runs at lower temperatures than radiators, which shows up on the monthly bill.
Two Spanish rulebooks come into play the moment you touch this. The RITE (Reglamento de Instalaciones Térmicas en los Edificios) governs heating, cooling and air quality, and a hotel is held to a higher standard than a flat. The CTE (Código Técnico de la Edificación) is Spain’s equivalent of the Building Regulations, and in a hotel it pulls fire safety and accessibility into scope as well. This is also where budgets move. Open a riser in a 1970s coastal hotel and you rarely find what the as-built drawings promised.
Energy: the bill you pay every month
Efficiency is the part of a refurbishment that pays back on a timetable you can put in a spreadsheet. Better glazing improves thermal insulation, so the air conditioning works less hard in August and the rooms hold their temperature at night. LED lighting cuts consumption and lasts long enough to keep the maintenance team off the ladders. Neither is clever engineering. Both are money you stop spending every month for the rest of the building’s life.
What the guest actually notices
Guests are the judges, and they are better travelled and harder to please than they were ten years ago. Colour and finish do change how a room feels: mint green and sky blue read as calm, pistachio and electric blue as energetic. Choose accordingly, and be consistent about it across the building.
Be honest about the order of priorities, though. Guests rarely praise new pipework; they punish old pipework. Read the one- and two-star reviews of almost any hotel on this coast and the same short list tends to come up: noise between rooms, water temperature, the smell from the drains, the mattress. Sort those out and the interior finishes get the credit.
The part the brochures leave out
A hotel under refurbishment is not earning. That closure can easily be the largest single cost of the project, and it belongs in the numbers from day one. In practice it means two decisions: run the works between November and February, when occupancy on the coast is at its lowest, and phase them floor by floor if the building and the fire strategy allow it, so part of the hotel stays open.
The other item owners underestimate is the paperwork. The works need planning permission (licencia de obras) from the town hall, and that timetable is set by the ayuntamiento, not by you or your builder. Architect’s and technical fees in Spain typically run 8–12% of build cost, noticeably below UK rates. Neither is a problem in itself. Finding out late is.
We are based in Torremolinos and work along the coast, from Málaga to Marbella, where you will also find us as architects in Marbella. Hotel work is a good part of what we do, from projects in central Málaga to Puente Romano in Marbella.
If you are weighing up a refurbishment, the sensible first step is a feasibility report before anything is designed. Ours run from €600 to €1,400 for a straightforward building, more for a large hotel, and they answer three questions: what the decree allows, what the building can take, and what the closed weeks will cost you. That is where our hotel architecture work usually starts. Tell us about the building.
