Renovating a hotel room in 24 hours without building work

Boutique hotels · Renovation without building work

How to renovate a hotel room in 24 hours with concealed fixing

By the Panelclip technical team · 6 min read · Management & Operations

Renovating a hotel room with traditional methods does not just cost the building work: it costs lost RevPAR, the noise that disturbs the guests who stay and the delays. There is an alternative that more and more boutique hotels are adopting: a system where panels are changed the way you would change a picture on the wall. Fast, clean and quiet.

The idea is simple but transformative: install the clips on the structure just once and, from then on, change the panels for ever. Without touching the wall again, without drying days and without losing a single night of revenue.

01The one-off investment

The concept is simple but powerful. In the first installation, the Fastmount female clips are fixed to the room's permanent structure: the plasterboard walls, the timber frames, the metal profiles. This is the only time real installation work is needed. The female clips stay there for good —they are the invisible infrastructure that makes everything else possible—.

The male clips are fitted to the back face of each decorative panel. When the panels are offered up to the wall, the males engage the females with a click. The panel is fixed, aligned and ready, without a single visible screw.

Fixing without drilling the panel: adhesive-mount male clips

In an occupied building you do not always want to —or cannot— drill. The adhesive-mount male clips are fixed to the back of the panel with high-performance structural adhesive (epoxy or polyurethane), without drilling the panel and without dust. The key nuance compared with traditional gluing: here the adhesive holds the clip, not the panel. The female clip is always fixed mechanically to the structure, and the panel remains removable and reusable in every cycle.

02The renovation workflow

Morning: removing the existing panels

A team of two can remove all the decorative panels from a standard hotel room in less than 30 minutes, without tools. Each panel is removed by pulling it or with a suction cup. They are stacked, packed and taken out of the room. No dust, no drill noise, no building waste.

Midday: preparation and inspection

With the panels removed, the structure is exposed. It is the perfect time to inspect concealed services, carry out minor plumbing or electrical repairs, or upgrade wiring. The female clips stay in place, ready to receive the new panels.

Afternoon: installing the new panels

The new panels —which arrive with the male clips already fitted at the factory or workshop— are placed in position. Click, click, click. Each panel is fixed in seconds. A team of two can install all the new panels in a room in 2 to 4 hours, depending on the number and size of the panels.

Late afternoon: cleaning and handover

The room is cleaned —minimal cleaning, because there has been no dust or waste—, the finishes are checked and the room is ready to be sold that same night or the next day.

03The comparison that changes everything

With the traditional method, renovating 60 rooms takes between 8 and 12 weeks of building work, with rooms out of service for 4-5 days each, constant noise and an army of contractors. With Fastmount concealed fixing, the same 60 rooms are renovated in 6 to 8 weeks, but without closing any room for more than a day, without noise disturbing guests and without specialist contractors: the hotel's own maintenance team can do the work.

Last year we renovated all the rooms in the south wing in the low season. Each room was out of service for less than a day. Our guests did not even notice we were renovating. With the previous system, we would have closed the whole wing for a month.

Isabel Ferrero — General manager, Hotel Casa del Mar, Mallorca

04The second-cycle advantage

The real power of the system shows in the second renovation, and the third, and the fourth. Because the female clips remain on the structure, the next time the hotel wants to change its look it only needs to make the new panels with the male clips and put them up. Without touching the structure, without surface preparation, without installing clips. Just changing panels.

A hotel that refreshes its image every five years with the traditional system needs a complete building job each time. A hotel with concealed fixing needs building work only the first time; after that, only new panels. The cumulative saving over 15-20 years is extraordinary.

Correct sizing by number of clips

The application images belong to Fastmount™. No acoustic values are claimed: all performance is referred to testing and the technical data sheet.