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.
