In 2005, Enrique ‘Kike’ Sarasola, a former Olympic athlete, founded Room Mate Hotels in Madrid. With no experience as a hotel entrepreneur but with a lot of experience as a customer, he launched an innovative chain aimed at people who travel to big cities to get to know and explore them.

Kike started from two premises that this target shared:

• ‘People are going to explore the city and therefore don’t spend so much time in the hotel’.
• ‘The best way to visit a city is to go and see a friend who lives there’.

Based on these premises and with the customer always at the centre, the Room Mate Hotels value proposition and customer experience was built around 6 key elements:

1. Central hotels: because people are going to get to know the city.
2. Good value for money: when you don’t spend so much time in the hotel, you can do without some services that make the price much more expensive. They decided to focus on what they considered key for their target audience: a comfortable bed, a good breakfast and Wi-Fi.
3. Each hotel has its own personality and is different: it’s like visiting a friend at home: Óscar in Madrid, Emma in Barcelona. And your friends’ houses are not all the same.
4. Emphasis on design: hiring great designers so that they could design these spaces with their own personality: Patricia Urquiola, Lázaro Rosa Violán, Tomás Alía, Lorenzo Castillo, Pascua Ortega, or Teresa Sapey.
5. A vocation for service and personalisation: trying to please the customer and give each one the best experience.
6. Selling through the internet: the online channel as the main channel from the beginning.

In an already mature business, we wanted to reinvent the service. Not to offer a standard service but to sell experience again. We had the illusion of recovering the magic of travelling.

With this differentiating proposition, from its beginnings with the Mario hotel in Madrid in 2005 until today, with more than 30 hotels in 15 cities, the chain has experienced sustained growth and has been able to consolidate its value proposition and business model in the market.

One of the elements that has helped it in this growth is how well they have built and worked the brand. In fact, I consider Room Mate Hotels to be a great example of brand consistency. All the elements of its brand (at the verbal, visual and experiential level) are consistent expressions of its brand strategy (of the value proposition and its essential attributes and personality).

In this analysis, we are going to focus specifically on naming because it is one of the brand elements in which it is most difficult to maintain consistency when you grow.

The importance of naming: a key element for success

The first naming exercise they had to do was to give a name to the chain itself. They called it Room Mate Hotels. Room mate means flatmate in English but it also refers to a room, which is basically what you rent in a hotel.

This name is a great choice: it expresses its clear international vocation, by choosing an English name; its differentiation, as it is very different from the more traditional chains and it is a direct expression of its value proposition: travelling as if you were going to see a friend, as if you were going to be their flatmate for a few days.

Expanding the portfolio: the creativity behind the names

Good strategic-creative decisions continued with the names of the hotels: naming the first hotel Mario was also very successful: a suggestive name that sets it apart from other hotels and is perfectly aligned with the brand’s value proposition – visiting the home of Mario, your friend from Madrid.

By personalising it, they could easily give it a personality that reflected that of the neighbourhood and the city in which it was located. Because there is not just one Madrid, there are many Madrids in Madrid. And it’s not the same if you go to the house of your friend Oscar, who is more alternative and lives in Chueca, as it is to visit your friend Alicia, on Prado Street.

But it also allowed them to generate a simple and consistent system that greatly facilitated the subsequent naming exercise. And all of us who have worked on this know how many resources can be consumed by the generation of new names. For Room Mate it was going to be easier: we just had to look for a local name that could represent the friend and the character of that city.

This is how Mario, Alicia, Óscar and Alba were born in Madrid, initially, followed by Leo, Anna, Gorka, Gerard and Valeria in Spain, but also Aitana, Emir, Luca, Filippo, Bruno in other European cities… Up to 30 in total. And there are more to come.

This system has not been followed in absolutely all the chain’s new openings. In 2015, Room Mate Capo d’Africa opened in Rome and in 2022 Room Mate Lime Tree Hotel opened in London and Palazzo Dei Fiori in Venice. I have not found an official explanation as to why these hotels kept these names and did not follow the established system. I can imagine that it might be because they already had a well-established position in the city or because they are the names of iconic buildings, or maybe it’s a legal issue. It would be interesting to know the reasons behind this decision. Because it is true that these names lose the freshness and originality of the previous ones and break the link with the brand.

Diversification of services: including tourist apartments

They also had to decide what to call the new line of business when in 2014 they decided to launch a platform offering tourist apartments with hotel services. They called it Be Mate. Again, a good name. It has a certain link with the chain – because it keeps mate – but at the same time it is independent as it offers another service and this allows them to build another brand with its own personality and attributes.

In fact, it is curious that while the naming does maintain a certain relationship with the group, the visual identity, the logo, the colours, the photographic style, do not.

Room Mate Collection: positioning the brand in the luxury segment

Two years ago, with the idea of premiumising part of their offering to reach a higher segment of customers and therefore capture more value, they carried out a brand architecture exercise and decided to create an umbrella brand to position themselves in the luxury segment. Thus was born Room Mate Collection.

With this new launch they generate an additional hierarchy in their brand architecture. Where previously there was only the chain name as the first level and the names of the hotels as the second level, now there is an intermediate level that differentiates Room Mate Hotels, aimed at a younger audience, and Room Mate Collection, which is committed to quiet luxury. They also took the opportunity to renew the brand with a new logo and colours.

This decision makes a lot of strategic sense: it is a good way of organising and differentiating their range of hotels and, as I always insist, the brand is an asset that has to be built into the business strategy. And in this case, it does just that: it allows them to grow in the more premium segment.

What is noticeable is that this decision is recent and is not yet 100% consolidated. On the website we can see how some Collection hotels have had their names changed to include this category, such as Gerard Room Mate Collection (in Barcelona) or Isabella Room Mate Collection (in Florence), while on some occasions they still refer to Room Mate Alba (instead of Alba Room Mate Collection) or Room Mate Gorka (instead of Gorka Room Mate Collection). Or in the Google Maps profiles this name change has not yet been updated. Little details that I am sure the chain will polish up as it continues to develop this line of hotels.

Conclusion

As the analysis shows, Room Mate Hotels is a great example of how a brand name can be both creative and strategic and have the flexibility to accompany the growth of the business. And how good brand architecture can help to understand what a brand has to offer when it has an extensive portfolio of products or services or wants to focus on a specific segment.

What thoughts have you got? How could other brands in the hotel industry follow the same path as Room Mate, adapting to new demands without losing their identity?

Rita Alonso, founder of Noxis, doesn’t just dissect strategies, she builds them. From Noxis, she helps brands move forward with focus and inspiration.

Sources:

1. Primary Sources

• Presentation by Kike Sarasola at the Travel Think Forum (2012): Kike Sarasola explains his business model and vision for Room Mate Hotels at a conference Watch presentation on YouTube
• Official website of Room Mate Hotels: Information about the chain’s history, philosophy and hotels.
  • Room Mate Hotels – About us
  • Room Mate Hotels – Destination Madrid
  • Wikipedia – Room Mate Hotels

2. Secondary Sources

• Articles about Room Mate Collection:
  • ‘Room Mate launches Collection, its first luxury brand’ – El Confidencial (2024). This article details the launch of Room Mate Collection and its positioning in the luxury market. Read article in El Confidencial
• Analysis of Room Mate’s expansion and philosophy:
  • ‘The Room Mate Hotels Phenomenon: Disruptive Innovation’ – Experalia (2012). An article analysing Room Mate’s innovative model and its impact on the industry. Read article on Experalia
  • ‘Room Mate Hotels Case: Innovation and Disruption in the Hotel Industry’ – Café del Marketing (2010). An analysis of how Room Mate has altered the traditional rules of the industry.Read article on Café del Marketing
• Other articles about Room Mate and its expansion:
  • ‘Room Mate: The success of a hotel chain that knows how to adapt to change’ – HospitalityNet (2024). This article analyses the evolution of Room Mate and its plans for future expansion.Read on HospitalityNet
• Analysis of Room Mate Hotels in the architectural design industry:
  • ‘Room Mate Hotels in interior design and architecture’ – Archello. Details Room Mate Hotels’ involvement in the architectural design of its establishments. Read on Archello

3. Research and editing collaboration:

• Artificial intelligence tool: ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, for text review and editing and to complete the sources section.