How do you sell a hotel discreetly?

A hotel that everyone knows is for sale rarely sells well. Discretion is not a promise to keep quiet. It is a method, applied from the first conversation through to completion: nothing is published, and information is released in stages to named people who have committed in writing to keep it to themselves.

In practice, a discreet sale rests on four rules:

• no advertisement, no listing on portals or social networks
• an anonymous teaser, written so that a professional in the local market cannot recognise the hotel
• no identifying information without a signed NDA
• buyers selected against their own criteria and approached one by one, never through a mass mailing

Why discretion protects the price

A sale that leaks damages the operation first. Staff grow anxious and start looking elsewhere. A competitor calls your sales manager. A corporate client hesitates to renew its contract. The bank, the landlord or the franchisor start asking questions before you have prepared your answers.

It then damages the negotiation. A hotel that has been seen everywhere, for months, becomes a file that everyone suspects has a problem. Buyers wait for the price to drop. Our guide on failed public sale processes describes how this happens.

What is released, and when

Discretion shows in the order in which documents are handed over. Each buyer receives what they need to move to the next stage, and nothing more.

Where staff must not know anything, the memorandum itself stays anonymous. The hotel’s identity, address and photographs are released only at the visit or at the letter of intent, in a separate document.

Visits and documents without alerting the team

The two most exposed moments are the visit and the gathering of documents.

A visit takes place at a time agreed with the seller, with no contact between the buyer and the staff. No buyer contacts the hotel, the operator, the landlord or suppliers directly: every question goes through the adviser, who keeps a record of it.

Accounts, the lease, contracts and technical reports are gathered without involving the team, often with the accountant’s help. Employee data stays anonymised and goes into the data room only at an advanced stage.

The limits of discretion

Some people will have to be told before completion, and the timetable must allow for it. Depending on the company and the deal structure, French law may require employees to be informed in advance: we cover this in should you tell your staff about the sale. A commercial lease or a franchise agreement may require the landlord’s or the franchisor’s consent. And the buyer’s bank will need to see the file before lending.

Finally, the seller remains the first guardian of the secret. As few people as possible in the know, including within the family and among partners. No parallel approach through another intermediary: the same hotel offered twice to the same buyer is noticed at once.

The role of an exclusive mandate

Staying discreet requires a single point of contact who knows, at every moment, who has received what. That is the purpose of an exclusive mandate: a distribution list approved by the seller, every dispatch logged, no presentation of the hotel outside that framework. We act for one client per transaction, the seller, and a dedicated senior contact follows every file.

How we conduct an off-market sale is set out on our page on confidential hotel sales.