A new Hilton internal website helps owners find restaurant concepts that best suit their properties.

In the next few days, Hilton Worldwide will launch a new web-based service to help its hotel owners find the best restaurant concepts for their properties. The website www.hiltonrestaurantconcepts.com acts as a matchmaker between owners and restaurant companies with concepts that can work in one of Hilton’s full-service brands. The site launches with 15 companies, including such well-known foodservice brands as Ruth’s Chris, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Mitchell’s Fish Market and others. Only Hilton owners and others with access to Hilton’s intranet can use the site.

According to Beth Scott, Hilton’s vice president of restaurant concepts for full-service and luxury brands and architect of the service, more restaurant companies will be added, with as many as 50 on the list by year-end. The roster of restaurant concepts include four turnkey solutions developed by Hilton and currently available to owned and managed properties.

We chatted with Scott yesterday as she made last-minute plans for the website launch:

At launch, the site will include 15 restaurant concepts with plans to have as many as 50 by the end of the year.

What is the website concept?
It’s an interactive tool that will allow hotel owners and operators in our portfolios to go into the system and do a couple of things. One is a random search of the restaurants we put on the site to see who we’ve developed relationships with, what concepts Hilton Worldwide has created internally we can provide to them and what consultants we work with if we can’t provide them with bespoke services for their restaurant needs. Or they can enter their profile, and based on the criteria the restaurateurs have set up with us on the types of deals they would do, the computer will sort and provide the searcher with some possible options for their hotels.

At that point, they will be redirected to some pages on the site about the restaurateurs—menus, website link and more—and if the searcher is interested in contacting the company, they fill out a short questionnaire about their hotel, which is sent directly to the restaurateur. We put them on their first date and what they do from there is up to them.

What was the inspiration for the program?
I’ll explain in the form of an analogy. A lot of hoteliers, especially in this economic climate, have the desire to either lease out their restaurants or bring in third-party operators or celebrity chefs to help position their hotels’ f&b. Once this department was launched, we were inundated with owner requests to help them get someone to lease their space or counsel them on concepts they could embrace that would be good for their hotels.

At the same time, I was having a private conversation with a friend who was going on a date with someone she met on eHarmony, and a light bulb went off on my head. I thought why not create something similar to an eHarmony platform to help our hotels match themselves with third-party restaurateurs?

To aid in the matchmaking, owners complete a short questionnaire profiling their properties.

Where did you find the restaurant companies to include on the site?
We’ve had existing relationships with some of them. For example, Ruth’s Chris has a couple of units in our hotels. We’ll vet new concepts on their abilities to operate successfully in hotels. Do they do other hotel restaurants? Can they do breakfast and roomservice? Not all of them are expected to be three-meal restaurants, but that’s one of the sorting criteria. Some of it will be objective. There isn’t a checklist that will make it 100% viable.

Are they all established brands, or do any of the companies offer one-off concepts?
None of them are one-off, at least at the start. There’s Ruth’s Chris and Mitchells and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, which is an alternative to Starbucks. We have a local burger operator here in the D.C. that is growing quickly that would be an interesting option for some hotels. We’re also interested in concepts that have the ability to expand internationally. We’re a global hotel company and a lot of our overseas owners and operators are very interested in American concepts.

Where will you find additional companies to add to the site?
I have an internal goal to get to 50 by the end of the year, but I don’t want to force something up there that’s not viable. So we’ll only add good solutions. And as the word gets out, some other interesting companies and concepts will probably come out of the woodwork.

How are you communicating the service to Hilton owners and operators?
We gave them a sneak preview at a worldwide owners conference we had in Orlando in January. We have an internal Hilton Worldwide website that will announce the launch of the site. We’ll also put it into the brand newsletters, and we will continue to talk about it with owners.

What are the Hilton prototype concepts on the site?
They’re meant to be turnkey solutions for the owners. We’re only rolling them out to owned or managed hotels and not yet available to franchisees. We provide construction guidelines, operating manuals, menus, recipes, etc. to help hotels that don’t have the f&b capabilities in-house. One is Flying Spoons, which is an Embassy Suites turnkey concept. The others are an in-house steakhouse, an Asian international concept and an expanded version of a grab-and-go.