Customer Story
Hotelatelier's finance team hit a familiar wall: Excel simply couldn't scale with their ambitions. Managing planning and forecasting across 40 hotels had become unsustainable. With Lucanet xP&A, they consolidated all hotel data into one connected model. The result? Faster planning cycles, flexible scenario modeling, and clear insights for every decision.
- Excel-based planning models were complex, interlinked, and hard to update
- Revenue planning required detailed logic by hotel, room type, and occupancy
- Growing brands, countries, and entities made planning increasingly complex
- Input from multiple departments was hard to collect and consolidate
Hotelatelier is a growing international hotel group headquartered in Spain, managing around 40 properties across several countries. The company combines multiple brands and ownership structures under a central finance function that oversees consolidation, planning, and long-term financial strategy.
xP&A gives us the flexibility to plan the way our business really works. We can model all our hotels and scenarios, and instantly see how one change affects everything.
Begoña Delgado
Financial Controller, Hotelatelier
Excel models couldn’t keep up with a growing, data-rich business
By 2021, Hotelatelier had already achieved major progress in consolidation and reporting through Lucanet Consolidation and Financial Planning (CFP), which replaced fragmented data with a single, reliable source for statutory and management figures. With a stable foundation in place, the finance team set out to extend the same consistency and transparency to its budgeting and analysis processes, which were still managed in Excel.
“When we wanted to change something – add a new hotel, a new variable, or a more detailed revenue driver – it became very difficult,” recalls Begoña Delgado, Financial Controller at Hotelatelier. “We worked with lots of Excels connected to each other. The model was hard to maintain and adapt.”
When Lucanet introduced its new xP&A solution, Hotelatelier was among the first to adopt it. The finance team saw an opportunity to unify operational and financial planning – without giving up the structure and auditability already established in CFP.
One connected model that mirrors how the hotel business operates
“xP&A lets us include all the variables we need,” says Delgado. “For example, we can calculate revenue by combining room price, occupancy per night, and location. It reflects exactly how our business works.”
The finance team built one connected model that mirrors how the hotel business operates – from revenue and costs to headcount and long-term forecasting.
- Actuals from SAP flow automatically into Lucanet CFP for consolidation and reporting.
- P&L data from CFP feeds directly into xP&A for operational and financial planning.
- Completed budgets in xP&A return to CFP for cash-flow and long-term forecasting.
“We prepare ten-year budgets,” Delgado notes. “xP&A calculates the operating plan, and we see the financial impact in Lucanet CFP with one click.”
Faster cycles, new planning possibilities
Within Lucanet xP&A, Hotelatelier has brought every aspect of its business model into one interactive planning environment:
- Revenue planning now reflects hotel-level reality, combining room rates, occupancy, seasonality, and location-specific factors.
- Expense and headcount models include salaries, bonuses, and hiring plans across provinces and departments – with every change automatically updating related figures.
- Scenario management allows the team to simulate new openings, renovations, or temporary closures in just a few clicks, and compare multiple outcomes side by side.
With this integrated setup, Hotelatelier gained full transparency across all planning dimensions and drastically shortened its budget cycle. “Once you have it, it saves a lot of time,” says Delgado. “The best part is the flexibility – it opens new possibilities. We’re already planning to extend it to tax and other areas.”
Full Story On-Demand:
How Hotelatelier Transformed Financial Planning with Lucanet xP&A