A perennial question and obviously subject to reasonable personal interpretation!

We would consider boutique hotels to have some size element - probably any property with more than 20 rooms would be pushing it.

There’s also a style element - a boutique hotel would generally have bedrooms and other spaces that are uniquely designed, ideally with the personal input of the owner.

We’d tend to consider properties part of a chain (or under a collective brand) not to be authentically 'boutique’ - even though they might still satisfy those criteria above.

It’s perhaps not worth getting too fussed about but those would be our simple definitions.

We market several properties for sale that have run as large villas, or smaller guesthouses and some of these we see as having potential to operate as boutique hotels - by that definition above.

They may have space to expand, or be running in a style that, with some changes, could ‘upgrade’ to that of a boutique hotel property.

For our sakes we consider any rental property that only rents as a single unit as a ‘villa’.

If the property rents out individual rooms and runs an operation that caters well to that setup throughout the year, we would think it (most likely) a boutique hotel.