The expansion of the international hotel chains, in their vast majority, was accompanied and made possible by a process of standardisation and commoditization. This process generated the birth of the box hotel concept, characterized by the uniformity of the core and facilitating products. The lack of differentiation between the hospitality products and services resulted finally in a “McDonaldisation” of the global hotel industry. This systematic standardisation of the hospitality product provoked a counter-movement inspired by consumers searching for hotels with unique or sophisticated and innovative characteristics, called boutique, design or lifestyle hotels. In the beginning of the 80s of the last century the term boutique hotel swept through the market and was used to describe unique 50-100 rooms properties, non chain-operated, with attention to fine detail and individual decoration in European or Asian influenced furnishings (literally a boutique as opposed to a department store). Sophistication and innovation explain the growth of the design and lifestyle hotel niches. In order to employ a generic term for these new niches, we will refer hereafter to the boutique, design and lifestyle concepts with the term lifestyle hotels.