Sol Melia, Spain's leading hotel group, has consolidated its strategy for using leisure as a local marketing tool. On regarding haute cuisine and nightlife as essential pillars for creating a remarkable client experience, the company has developed innovative concepts and attributes in the food and beverage areas of each one of its brands, providing value added and positioning its properties at the epicentre of social life.
Over the last few years, the hotel company has developed this strategy with the opening of fashionable venues, designed as meeting places to "see and be seen", to hold glamorous events, and to host the increasingly more common-place after-work meetings. The Penthouse at ME Madrid, managed by the Gerber Group, clearly illustrates the local marketing positioning that a hotel can achieve thanks to the success of a terrace that has become a social meeting place in Madrid. This is the reason why Sol Melia has chosen to work with prestigious international associates not only in the field of cuisine (Dani Garcia, the Torres brothers), but also in that of leisure. The most recent example is the alliance with the well-known expert in cocktails Javier de las Muelas, who is about to open his famous Dry Martini Cosmopolitan Bar at the Gran Melia Fenix Hotel in Madrid.
The company has also opened its own modern, hip venues, offering elegant surrounding in which to relax after work, combining music, cocktails and select cuisine. This is the case of Melia’s Q Lounge brand, venues designed for chilling out or networking over tapas and pinchos accompanied by delicious cocktails, such as those at Melia Barcelona, hosting a large number of events attended by the city’s celebrities, the Melia de Mar (Mallorca, Balearic Islands), the recently opened lounge at the Melia Bilbao (Vizcaya, Basque Country), or the Q Lounge opening shortly at the Melia Berlin (Germany).
