Hands-on consultancy, fully traceable tools
Expertise & Hôtellerie is an independent consultancy advising hotels in West Africa on architecture, safety, regulation and classification.
Emiliano, founder
For more than ten years, Emiliano worked in France on over a hundred hotel properties: new builds, refurbishments, restructurings and conversions, fire safety, accessibility, and bringing existing hotels up to standard.
What he takes from it is that a hotel is at once a building, a business, an operating tool, a tourism product and an investment. A badly resolved circulation route, or a requirement discovered too late, weighs on safety, service and returns alike.
Now based in Togo, he is a member of the CNACET, the national commission that licenses and classifies tourism establishments. That role is kept strictly separate from the consultancy: he recuses himself whenever the commission examines a client property, and the firm makes no use of any information from the commission. The rules are set out on our Ethics page.
He also publishes HOTELA, a newsletter on the changes reshaping the hotel industry in Africa, independently of the firm.
Georges, technology partner
Through his company Modalko, Georges designs, builds and runs the tool that structures field observations, applies the classification grids and produces the reports.
Our method
- Observe. On site, every criterion in the grid is checked space by space, with photos, measurements and notes. Staff are told about the visit beforehand.
- Calculate. A rules engine mechanically applies the grid for the country and the target category. The calculation can be reproduced, and its full trail appears in the report.
- Validate. The auditor reviews every finding; any change must be justified and is kept in a log that no one can erase.
- Deliver. The signed report links every gap to its criterion, its legal basis, its evidence and the person who validated it, with a works programme ranked by priority.
Artificial intelligence may help to organise notes and draft text. It never scores a property and never decides any result.