Challenges in hotel building refurbishment projects in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Amongst the contemporary issues encountered by the buildings, deterioration and obsolescence are in the forefront. The refurbishment has been acknowledged as an avenue to deliver profound solutions to overcome these issues by upgrading, altering, extending, renovating and improving facilities and prolonging building lifespan. Nevertheless, refurbishment projects are uncertain and sophisticated with many challenges. Refurbishment projects in Sri Lanka are dominated in hotel buildings compared to other types of buildings because hotel buildings needed to be upgraded and modified frequently to maintain the tourist attraction intact. Nevertheless, the challenges in these projects remain unprecedented due to lack of in depth investigation. This research therefore, set out to explore the challenges in hotel building refurbishment projects in Sri Lanka. A qualitative approach was applied by focusing on three recently completed hotel building refurbishment projects. Subsequently, data collected through unstructured interviews with the participants involved in the refurbishment projects, document reviewing and observations were analysed using content analysis. The findings revealed topmost challenges as the budget overruns due to superficial designs and construction activities, time overruns due to refining designs to cater unanticipated building conditions, limitations to introduce changes to the existing building structures and the interruptions to building occupants due to simultaneous operations. The budget overruns for Cases A, B and C were reported as 13.64%, 1.38% and 0.95% respectively. The time overruns were calculated as 55.56%, 25% and 50% respectively. These challenges adversely affected in achieving value for money in terms of cost, time, quality, customer satisfaction and sustainability.