BOQ for a hotel: the typical room, the finishes and what is supplied by others
A BOQ for a hotel is built around a typical room that repeats dozens of times, and next to it spaces that a residential building does not have: a lobby, restaurants, kitchens, a spa, a pool and service areas. I have experience in quantity takeoff and pricing for the completion of a hotel whose structural frame was already standing, for a contractor who submitted a lump-sum offer: typical guest-room floors, suite floors, a spa and pool, kitchens, a conference hall and a car park. On this page I have put together what is special about a hotel, how to build the bill and where the mistakes recur.
What a BOQ for a hotel includes
A hotel has three families of areas. The guest-room floors are the repeating part: room, bathroom, corridor, the floor protected space (a reinforced shelter room serving the floor) and balconies. The public spaces are the lobby, the restaurants, the conference hall, the gym, the spa and the pool. The service areas, which guests do not see, are the kitchens, the service yard, the luggage room, the stores and the plant rooms. Each family has a different rhythm of items, so it is worth building the bill so that each one can be totalled separately.
On the hotel I worked on, the bill was built from several sources: the systems consultants' bills of quantities, a finishes table for every space, the kitchen equipment list and a Revit model built on a survey of the existing structure. For the guest-room floors I also prepared a measurement file in DWG. The client's instruction was not to guess: every missing piece of data went out as a question. Merging the consultants' bills has its own page: consultants' bills of quantities.
The typical room: one mistake repeats in every room
On the guest-room floors the bill starts from one room. The electrical bill for that hotel had a single item priced as a complete set, “hotel room: lighting, power and communications installation”, repeated for every room. For each room the item included about 13 lighting points, 11 sockets, two data points, provisions for fire detection and the public address system, a smoke detector, an air-conditioning point and a room distribution board. The light fittings and the room control unit were supplied by others, and the contractor only installed them.
The advantage is clear: you calculate one room and multiply. The drawback is just as clear: a mistake in the typical room is multiplied by the number of rooms. So the room is checked against the drawing before multiplying, and everything that is not typical is counted separately. An accessible room, a corner room and a suite are not the same room, and on the suite floors the check starts again from the beginning.
Bathrooms, corridors and the finishes table
In a hotel the finishes are a large part of the work, and the convenient way to manage them is a table: floor, type of space, floor area and wall area. In the bathrooms of the guest-room floors, which were built as ordinary wet rooms and not as prefabricated pods, the wall tiling area was about 4 times the floor area, and in the suites about 3.4 times. In the corridors, with decorative wall cladding, there were about 1.35 m² of wall for every m² of floor.
Ratios like these help to check someone else's table: if a bathroom comes out with wall tiling equal to its floor area, something is missing. The table for that hotel also had a column of 8% wastage and a column of a 20% addition, and together they multiply the net area by 1.296. A factor like that should be a visible parameter at the top of the table, not a number hidden inside a formula. The full explanation of finishes is on the finishes quantities page.
What is supplied by others and what is in the contractor's scope
In a hotel many items come from the operator's or the developer's suppliers, and the contractor only installs them. In the bill I worked on, the room light fittings and the control units were marked “to be supplied by others”, the saunas came as ready-made units, and the kitchen equipment came as a list from the kitchen consultant: three kitchens with a combined electrical load of about 490 kW. The kitchen hoods were measured from the hood consultant's design. For every such item you write explicitly who supplies it and who installs it, so that it is neither counted twice nor lost.
When the frame is already standing, there are also works that have already been ordered or are already under way, such as masonry partitions or the upgrade of protected spaces, and systems that come from another supplier. Every such exclusion is written explicitly in the offer. The existing structure is checked in the model by phase: existing, new and demolition.
Systems: electrical is the heavy chapter
In a hotel the systems are denser than in a residential building. In the consultants' bills for that hotel, out of 622 coded lines, 344 were electrical, 102 HVAC, 86 plumbing and 42 sprinklers, and next to them were hundreds more lines of external works by zone. The electrical works also included a generator and a high-voltage room with two transformers. The hot water had heat pumps and large storage tanks, with a Legionella test at the end. In the basement car parks the takeoff covered an epoxy floor coating, thicker on the ramps, and a carbon monoxide detection system.
Some items are counted rather than measured. The hotel had guest lifts, glass lifts, a service lift, a food lift and a refuse lift. A food lift and a refuse lift are an operational separation that a residential building does not have, and every lift has a shaft, openings and building works, which need checking to see whether the supplier's quote included them.
One typical room is checked against the drawing, against the electrical bill and against the finishes table, and only then multiplied. After that, the rooms that are not typical are counted separately. This is the key check in a hotel bill, because every mistake in it is multiplied.
A quantity surveyor is an engineer or a registered building technician, like Yaakov Avital, who measures the drawings or the model and turns them into items that can be priced. In a hotel part of the work is calculation, and part is separating what the contractor supplies, what is supplied by others and what already exists in the structure.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a BOQ for a hotel and a BOQ for a residential building?
A hotel has a typical room that repeats dozens of times, public spaces, service areas such as kitchens and a service yard, and denser systems. Some items are supplied by the operator and only installed, and that has to be written in every item.
How are quantities taken off when the frame already exists?
You survey the existing structure, build a model or a measured drawing from it, and mark what exists, what is new and what is demolished. Works already under way are excluded explicitly, and anything unclear goes out as a question.
How is the fee for a BOQ for a hotel set?
By the total built area, including basements and service areas, as for any building. The full scale is on my quantity surveyor fees page, and the price for each project is set in a written quote. It helps to attach the area schedule to your enquiry.
Can the work be done from a Revit model alone?
The model helps a lot on the repeating floors and with counting, but the finishes table, the kitchen equipment list and the consultants' bills fill in what the model does not have. Each item is marked with where its quantity came from. On working with models: quantities from a Revit model.
Have a project? Tell me briefly what the project is and what already exists. When the project is a good fit, I usually reply with focused questions and a written quote.
Contact me for a quote* Created with AI for marketing, for illustration only. Not reviewed by Yaakov Avital and not professional advice. Every project must be checked on its own by a professional quantity surveyor and an engineer.