FOR A fresh perspective on the road ahead for Scotland's hotel industry, talk to Pierre-Alban Guy, a quadri-lingual Frenchman, with plans for a new boutique hotel empire of "affordable luxury" based on our unique super-abundance of minor castles and country estates.

Those of us who take the Scottish landscape and historical property stock for granted could learn from a man who has built the value of these assets into his long-term business plan, after pouncing on two underdeveloped family-run hotels in 2007 and 2008 for a combined £5 million.

His Scotophilia is based, perhaps surprisingly, on a view of this country as essentially business-friendly. With extensive experience of working and training abroad, his views of the international context are worth hearing.

Guy was raised partly in Switzerland, partly in Singapore, and partly at a Swedish boarding school. A natural hotelier - in that he talks convincingly about "wanting to make people feel special" - he trained at the famously rigorous Swiss hotel school, Les Roches.

Armed with the confidence of this elite training, and an aggressive sense of how good value sells itself, Guy is not going to let economic slowdown get in his way.

Alban's company, PAG Hotels, backed by two investors, one French and one from Mauritius, bought Castle Venlaw, a 12-bedroom 18th-century baronial pile near Peebles. In July, Alban followed that with the 25-bedroom Auchen Castle, a grand shooting lodge just off the M74 near Moffat.

Both hotels have already scored highly with industry arbitrators such as HotelReviewScotland.com and the Johansen guide. Now Guy is bedding in further refurbishments as he searches out his next purchase, preferably in the Scottish or English border counties. His backers, he says, have plenty more to spend, though he is coy about revealing the size of his war chest.

Beyond the UK, he has European ambitions and he projects a sense of a major hotelier in the early stages of a career empire-building. His calls his group "a very big player in its infancy".

But in this economic climate, when there is a widespread aversion to spending, or being seen to spend money, is a vision of a boutique empire sensible? Absolutely, say industry peers.

"There are plenty of examples of good hoteliers who expand during a downturn", says Gavin Ellis, former Scottish spokesman of the British Hospitality Association and director of the four-star Knockomie Hotel near Forres.

"Rocco Forte bought the Balmoral in a downturn, and successful chains like Hand Picked owner of the award-winning Norton House Hotel near Edinburgh expanded a lot in the downturn.

"If you are canny, this is the time to be doing it, as you get better pricing in the building and the refurbishment, and when the good times return, as they surely will, the returns will be much better than if you'd developed in a boom. We are going to be refurbishing next year for just that reason."

Guy, 39, decided to strike out on his own when there were already economic clouds gathering, which might have prompted others in comfortable corporate circumstances to stick with them. He has a background in large hotel chains, including Marriot, Intercontinental and the French group Accor, where he was head-hunted to lead the revenue division based in Hammersmith.

But he was "not happy" as a player in a corporate machine. "If Paris told you to sneeze, then you had to sneeze," he says.

"It was pure chance that Castle Venlaw came on the market when I was secretly looking around. I resigned from the company when I was still a quarter of a million short of what I needed to buy the hotel, which was a big risk, but it was the right thing to do."

Used as he is to continental business practices, Guy talks of the UK as a kind of entrepreneurial paradise.

"Britain is such a wonderful country to do business in. Starting and running a limited company, and the access to finance and the lack of union interference. This is an Americanised European country, you don't have all the things like the 35-hour week we have to deal with in France, or the fact that German workers are allowed paid time off for training three times a year."

PAG's plan is to create a portfolio of properties that trade on the "romance and charm of country living", meaning castles and stately homes in beautiful surroundings. As with Hand Picked, they concentrate on stringent attention to detail and high levels of service. They also provide the exceptional food that you would expect from a fastidious Frenchman in love with the Scottish larder.

Guy's standards are apparent in his appointment of rising-star, AA rosette-garlanded chefs; William Furlong at Venlaw and Paul Gibson at Auchen Castle. The latter has been kept busy of late cooking for the cast of the new BBC series Hope Springs, who are staying at Auchen while shooting nearby.

The PAG group will be built on the principle that excellence in service can and should not be the preserve of the elite, and that attitude and ingenuity can produce relaxed rural luxury at sub-Gleneagles prices. Largely, this is a matter of scale. Smaller staffs make it easier to ensure service quality. "A lot of hotels will charge for small things like £15 for an hour of wi-fi, or hundreds of pounds for a nip of rare whisky," says Guy. "You can be profitable without charging silly money. What it comes down to is that we don't take the piss."

A PAG spokesman spells it out: "Pierre wants people from the cities and from different backgrounds to experience what it is like to stay in a stately home or castle, and enjoy the period characteristics of country properties, spiral towers and open fires to four-poster beds and elegant woodwork."

PAG's three key markets are leisure - focusing on international and UK market - weddings and the meetings and conferencing market. The rural seclusion of the properties is a selling point for many corporates. "The Russian market is particularly keen on properties with a secluded setting," says the spokesman.

Meanwhile, PAG's lucrative wedding book is full until 2009. Booking your wedding two years in advance might be seen as evidence of strong romantic optimism on the part of the couples who pay their deposits. If so, they are choosing a setting that shares their values.