When we quote a hotel or a restaurant, the construction number is rarely the biggest number in the room. The revenue the building doesn't earn while it's offline usually is. That's why hospitality work is a scheduling problem first.
For hotels, the unit of planning is a block of rooms, not the property. We take a block, finish it completely — floors, bath, casework, paint, lighting, and punch list — hand it back for sale, and only then open the next block. It's slower on paper than gutting a whole floor at once, but the property keeps selling inventory the entire time, and that math almost always wins.
For restaurants, the split is usually front of house versus back of house, and the two have different constraints. Dining rooms and bars can often be done in stages behind hard containment while the rest of the room keeps trading. Kitchens generally can't be phased the same way, because the health inspection covers the whole line — so kitchen work gets compressed into the shortest possible closure, planned to the day, with equipment and finishes on site before we start.
Night work is the other lever. It costs more per hour and it's worth it when the alternative is closing at dinner service. What makes night work succeed is boring logistics: a separate crew entrance away from guests, materials staged the evening before, and a hard rule that the space is clean and service-ready before the crew leaves.
One practical ask for owners: bring us in before the design is final. Half the phasing problems we see were designed in — a mechanical run that crosses every guest room, or a new restroom location that takes the whole dining room offline. Those are cheap to solve on paper and expensive to solve once the plans are approved.