Location planning is a theory according to which private, and public companies choose places to organize themselves. Thus, it aims at helping to select the best place to increase profits and potential clients or customers. Moreover, a central place theory claims that business units are not uniformly located, meaning that companies are organized around demand. In other words, “locations with greater demand will generate more business units and a wider variety of business types than locations with less demand” (Yang et al., 2017, 34). Apart from demand existing in the area of planned business organization, the economic characteristics of the region are also highly important in its survival (Kim et al., 2019). In their article, Sirirak et al. (2018) emphasize that tourist attractions, such as marketplaces, museums, restaurants, local lions, and others, are located in a balanced way in order to stimulate tourism economically.
There is a new restaurant in Barbados, which is called “Horizon restaurant and bar.” This place is located near the hotels, in which a lot of tourists live during their trips to Barbados. As claimed previously, restaurants and bars choose their locations based on other tourist destinations, balancing routes to them. Moreover, as argued by Yang et al. (2017), a restaurant’s location is planned based on the total demand in the potential area and its sociodemographic characteristics.
This family-oriented “Horizon restaurant and bar” seeks to achieve as many couples becoming its clients as possible. This is true because of the restaurant’s location choice. This restaurant is placed near places popular among children: there are some playgrounds nearby and places attracting people seeking to have a rest and walk nearby this bar.
The formal methods for location planning and analysis that should be applied to a new bar, “Hoziron Restaurant and Bar,” is * The first step in planning a location for a restaurant is determining the theme and the type of dining that this facility will offer to the clients. For example, fast food restaurants have to have easy access and be located in places where many people gather since their clients depend on this accessibility and ability to enter and eat as fast as possible. In contrast to this, fine dining or theme restaurants do not depend as much on location, and on the contrary, it can be better for them if the location is chosen outside of the crowded areas of the city because it will support the fine-dining theme and the exclusivity of the place.
Since “Horizon Restaurant and Bar” is a family restaurant, its location has to be close to the places where families typically go; for example, since Barbados is a tourist destination, the location near hotels would be ideal. When using a SWOT analysis as a formal method for evaluating the location options, one can note that there is a strong rationale for this location choice. Mainly, the strength of this location choice is that families who want to try food options other than those offered by their hotels’ restaurants will likely not want to commute far.
However, the threat of this location choice is that the hotels are a strong alternative to what Horizon offers, which creates strong competition, and the weakness of this option is the inability to differentiate this restaurant from others due to its concept. The opportunity, in this case, would be to select the location that is in between the hotels and the beach or other tourist attractions to offer to dine with families who have gone out for a day and want to eat before returning to their hotel.
References
Kim, Dongjun, Yi, Changhyo, and Lee, Seungil. 2019. A Study on the Survival Characteristics of the Restaurant Business in Major and Side-Street Trade Areas, Seoul. Journal of Korea Planning Association 54.5, 76-90.
Sirirak, Worapot, and Pitakaso, Rapeepan. 2018. Marketplace Location Decision Making and Tourism Route Planning. Administrative Sciences 8.4.
Yang, Yang, Roehl, Wesley S., and Huang, Jing-Huei. 2017. Understanding and Projecting the Restaurantscape: The Influence of Neighborhood Sociodemographic Characteristics on Restaurant Location. International Journal of Hospitality Management 67, 33-45.