THE BOTTOM LINE: Spain-based Dreamplace Hotels Resorts demonstrates how impactful lean thinking can be in the hospitality industry. Building on early improvement efforts and a capability development program (Plan Talento), the company launched a lean transformation a decade ago that has driven both performance gains and deep cultural change.
Today lean is a core strategic asset, helping Dreamplace achieve 15–20% lower costs than competitors, higher customer loyalty, and reduced employee turnover. Results stem from rigorous standardization, continuous improvement, and empowered cross-functional teams solving problems close to the work. A robust management system ensures standards are sustained and a focus on yokoten helps learning spread across hotels. In 2024 alone, local improvements eliminated 1.1 million minutes of non-value-added work.
The hospitality industry combines high labor intensity and employee turnover, operational complexity, wasteful processes, and poor work design — creating an environment where lean’s focus on standard work, stability, and continuous improvement can have disproportionate impact.
Dreamplace Hotels & Resorts in Spain’s Canary Islands realized this around 10 years ago, when they initiated a lean transformation, building on their earlier improvement work. While focused on isolated process fixes, previous efforts included a corporate plan for capability development — known as Plan Talento — which laid the groundwork for a lean turnaround.
What the organization has been able to achieve over the past decade is not just significant improvements in performance, but also a complete cultural transformation. Today, Dreamplace is a model for the application of lean in hospitality.
The success of the company’s seven hotels hinges on two strategic assets: a strong marketing function that drives direct bookings and reduces dependence on commission-heavy booking platforms, and a deep commitment to lean thinking. The organization estimates that lean has delivered a 15-20% cost advantage over competitors, alongside higher customer loyalty and lower-than-average employee turnover.
The organization estimates that lean has delivered a 15-20% cost advantage over competitors, alongside higher customer loyalty and lower-than-average employee turnover.
Ultimately, what sets a hotel apart from the competition is how service is experienced by guests — be it a freshly made breakfast, a speedy check-in, or spotless room. Dreamplace’s competitive advantage comes from disciplined standardization and continuous improvement, enabling service excellence, efficient work, and rapid response to customer issues.
The pace of improvement at Dreamplace picks up year after year. In 2024, the company saved 1.1 million minutes of non-value added work. It’s the cumulative effect of local improvements that allows Dreamplace to reach such impressive results. For example, Hotel Tagoro in Tenerife recently changed the layout and workflow of its kitchen, cutting service time per meal from 320 to 260 minutes and slashing internal movement by 2.5 miles per shift. Other recent improvements included reducing water waste by 11,000 liters annually by using treated pool water in the gardens, and reconfiguring maintenance carts and improving coordination to enable 24 monthly preventive checks (thus avoiding unnecessary room changes and customer complaints).
What ensures adherence to standards (which is currently at 85%) and overall sustainment of results is a set of nested management systems, a structure of meetings and visual boards that connect problem visibility with coordinated action across the organization. To zoom in on specific segments of a value stream and stay on top of the issues that appear in each department, hotels use something they call “arrows” (essentially, value-stream maps representing the customer journey). There are two in each hotel—one for food&beverage, one for the rooms division—and one at corporate level. Connecting the three, and bridging the gap between high-level performance data and local execution, is the “Hotel Tube,” a board that tracks macro, group-level KPIs and the micro KPIs relevant to each property’s guest journey.
Antonio Lopez, Maitre at Gran Tacande Hotel (also in Tenerife) said: “The Arrow has really strengthened our team… We are truly cross-functional now. Everyone understands the work of their colleagues and this brings us all together.” Read more about how the Arrow is used by the kitchen of the Gran Tacande Hotel here.
Another pillar of Dreamplace’s lean transformation is knowledge sharing. The company wants to ensure that lean knowledge and expertise reach every corner of its hotels. To do that, they organize regular sharing sessions (“Lean Days”), during which cross-functional teams from each property show up with their A3s and share the improvements they have been working on in the previous trimester, highlighting results and learnings.
LEI’s Josh Howell first visited Dreamplace in 2018, early in the company’s transformation. Even then, he saw “beautifully messy A3-sized papers” posted on every available wall. According to Howell, “each A3 told a clear and simple problem-solving story through handwritten notes, sketches, charts, and post-its. An A3’s author was as likely to be a frontline worker as it was to be a manager. In many cases, the authors (plural) were members of small cross-functional teams who were problem solving collaboratively. In this way, problem solving and teamwork were becoming a prominent part of everyone’s job.”
Enabling cross-functional teams has proved a winning strategy, further strengthened by collaboration between hotels and even moving key leaders between properties to spread capability and experience.
In this interview, Cristina Aguiar Rivero, Director of the Gran Tacande Hotel, said: “The hotel where lean first appeared was Tigotan. They were alone running experiments for a few months, until we at Gran Tacande also decided to start. From the very beginning, Tigotan staff supported us, sharing their experience during the regular meeting that took place every couple of months. I visited Tigotan every time I could, trying to learn as much as possible.”
Oriol Cuatrecasas, President of Instituto Lean Management in Barcelona and facilitator of the Dreamplace transformation, remembers how, during his first interaction with the company, General Director Marco Lopez explained the reason Dreamplace wanted to embrace lean: “They wanted to break silo thinking and become a horizontal organization. He also said that they wanted to empower people to make important business decisions. I fell in love with them right away.”
In a hotel group with 1,000 employees, you can’t expect just 20-30 people to take care of the entire guest experience.
– Marco López, CEO, Dreamplace Hotels
Indeed, empowering people lies at the heart of Dreamplace’s ethos. The organization has achieved full participation and engagement in lean by creating space for frontline workers to tackle the problems they identify (even when they are not business-critical) and by making lean tools, such as the A3, fully accessible to everyone.
“In a hotel group with 1,000 employees, you can’t expect just a group of 20-30 people to take care of the entire guest experience. Everyone has to be part of this,” Lopez said. At the 2025 Lean Global Connection, Lopez futher elaborated on this: “We try to help leaders navigate constant change, inspire their teams, and prioritize both results and people well-being. It’s an investment for us. If we invest in people, we’ll have better results. Don’t forget, people leave bosses — not companies.”
Marco Lopez will deliver a keynote address at the Lean Summit in Houston on March 12-13.
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