Business View Oceania | September 2020

36 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA SEPTEMBER 2020 Rialto is located in a part of Melbourne that’s a bit like Wall Street – close to bank headquarters, consulting company headquarters, the big legal companies, the court district. So Monday to Thursday most of our customers are here for a business-related reason. During those days, we run at about 55 percent return guests who have business in Melbourne every week. We know all of our customers very well. We have one particular customer who we know so well that we know the order to hang up his shirts that he leaves behind. The Monday shirt, the Tuesday shirt, etc., so that’s our first hotel. “The second one is the weekend hotel and that’s a much more broad mix. Even people from Melbourne, itself, having a staycation. There are people from Brisbane and New Zealand and although we have international guests through the week, we tend to get more on the weekends because Melbourne is very event driven. Lots of festivals and things like the Melbourne Grand Prix (The Mercedes Formula 1 team stay here every year, we’re their lucky charm hotel.) And so our leisure business is more diverse.” BVO: What makes your hotel a preferred choice for business and leisure guests? Steube: “We are not a 50-storey brand new hotel with great big rooms and views forever and gold-plated taps. So we have to embrace the pride of our heritage as a 130-year-old building that has been converted into a hotel with all the features and the history retained. Originally, the function rooms were in plasterboard and beige paint and simple carpet. And we said, that’s not honest enough. So we stripped back to show the actual bricks and we put a very brightly patterned carpet in. The old bluestone laneway outside the rooms, which is the way that wagons used to get into the building to deliver, is the last private laneway in Melbourne and no one knows it’s there. So we had a professional graffiti company paint pictures on the wall. When you’re in the Laneway Rooms and look out, you see a Melbourne graffiti wall with a spotlight on it.