A short detour through Southern California brought me to an independent property advertising itself as a 'lifestyle hotel'. Not knowing the specifics of what this meant in a West Coast context, who exactly this hotel was targeting or how the property was differentiating itself to substantiate this modifier, I was curiously excited to try it out.
A rapid rise in branded hotel supply over the past several years, among other factors, has created a positive investment environment for boutique and lifestyle hotels. Just one day after the mega 38th Annual NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference, the Boutique & Lifestyle Lodging Association (BLLA) shifted the focus from big brands to boutiques at its third annual Boutique Hotel Investment Conference.
You've probably heard the term 'third space' thrown around here and there, and you've probably given it some thought. With all the recent shifts in consumer behavior, however, it's important that you understand this concept in full and how you might use it to enhance a property's atmosphere. To summarize, the third space describes a place where people congregate outside of the home (first space) and the office (second space). If you can engineer parts of your hotel – the lobby, the restaurant, the bar, the café and so forth – as flourishing third spaces, then it will play to your advantage for both higher occupancy levels and hotel cachet. (It's also called the 'third place', but I prefer 'space' over 'place' because the former has less of a 'runner up' connation.)
How much is that boutique hotel in the window? Well, it's around $430 million. Yes, that's the price InterContinental Hotels Group (one of the biggest hotel companies in the world) paid to acquire Kimpton Hotels, the original boutique hotel group, which includes 62 hotels and 71 hotel-based restaurants and bars. The number might sound big, but in reality it's a drop in the IHG ocean of hotel brands and assets.
Like all other aspects of a hotel, the connectivity afforded to us by the growth of the internet has forever changed the landscape of meetings. In this virtual world, people do not necessarily have to meet face-to-face, or be in the same country, to open a dialogue or efficiently conclude business agreements. But even with this grand technological advancement, the act of meeting together in a preordained conference setting is still an especially productive activity.
How will the hotel of the next decade change physically? What underlying trends are influencing top designers to adapt the way hotels look and feel – inside and out? We asked Raj Chandnani, Vice President of Strategy for WATG and its sister company Wimberly Interiors, to lead us on a highly visual walk through the key developments they are integrating into the hotels they are designing now. The following portfolio, put together exclusively for The Hotel Yearbook, highlights some of the exciting changes we’ll all be seeing, end experiencing, soon.
Special interests & passions are driving travel decisions more and more, from themed weeks at hotels and cruise ships and tour operator offerings to learning vacations and now, hotel brands. Drivers in travel buying decisions are increasingly about psychographics – behavior – rather than demographic determinants. Let's take a look first at the traditional "big four" of demographics: gender, age, geography and income and their influence today:
For the well-travelled business traveller or tourist, the hotel room experience can be dull. Usually the various hotel experiences become hazy - each guest room could be in any hotel, anywhere in the world. This is because the room configuration and experience is generally the same in most hotels. This negative experience is caused by lack of personality, banality and monotony.
Those of us fortunate enough to have worked at the Damascus Sheraton Hotel in Syria have been pained by recent events. However these circumstances have brought some of us back together again after many years of separation. Valentino Bertolini and I worked there in the late 1970's when we were both at the beginning of our careers. Valentino now leads Starwood's cluster of hotels in Florence, Italy. My wife and I were vacationing nearby recently so we passed by and had dinner with Valentino and his wife Francoise. Our dinner conversation served to prove how close we still are after all these years and also allowed Valentino to show off his rooftop restaurant.
Hotels can be subdivided into different categories – hotels for business people, leisure travellers, motels, budget hotels, luxury hotels, convention hotels and conference centres etc. However, they all have one point in common: they rent rooms and try to provide guest comfort. Every hotelier knows that if a room is not sold, there is no possibility of making up the loss the next day: the life expectancy of the hotel product is very limited. Viewed from the outside, there is a tendency to adopt global technical solutions for providing occupant comfort including thermal (wellbeing), olfactory (air quality) comfort, with the result that technical systems in hotels may be designed, installed and operated in a similar manner to banks, shopping malls or large office buildings.
The 2012 Olympic Games are giving London the impetus to complete a number of hotel projects – which in turn is giving interior designers the opportunity to demonstrate their creativity in some interesting new spaces. Dexter Moren, Director at London-based design practice Dexter Moren Associates, shares his expectations for the key design trends he sees for the year ahead in this dynamic hotel market.
In this interview, James Kinney – founder of James Kinney Live – shares how hotels can improve their content strategy and increase social currency through music and live events. Josiah: Your marketing materials say you created James Kinney Live to “create intimate experiences that successfully communicate the culture and feel of a particular brand.” What does this mean?
Are relationships between big hotel groups and the big design giants being challenged by smaller design studios? There are compelling reasons why large hotel groups select established global design giants, including proven design capabilities, capable workforce, structured design competencies, flexible allocation to manage peak times, global support etc. However more recently, small design studios are breaking into this market by offering superior marketable design at more competitive rates.
The hospitality design world has not been known for embracing dramatic structural changes. “But the future could be different,” says HOWARD J. WOLFF, Senior Vice President at WATG in Honolulu. He shares with us here some fascinating approaches to three particular challenges that the hotel industry faces and may even find opportunities to implement using design solutions in 2011 and beyond.
INES KLEMM lectures on hospitality concepts and interior design at the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) and the Institut Paul Bocuse in Lyon. In the hospitality world, her work examines the ways that space, light and color are tied to a guest’s emotion and memory – and how this in turn may ultimately affect brand identity. We asked her how she sees hotels using these concepts in 2011.
What are some of the new hospitality concepts that may affect the hotel industry next year? Design Hotels AG’s Founder and CEO CLAUS SENDLINGER describes the major trends that he believes will gain momentum in 2011. The one thing that’s certain in the hospitality world is change. New market niches are opening up as travelers’ wants and needs evolve. Several movements are simultaneously occurring in the hotel industry, all of which are set to have dramatic effects over the long term. Here, I’ll focus on four trends that will make an impact in the upcoming year.
Chip Conley knows how and when to come out. A prominent gay entrepreneur, he is the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, a quirky collection of boutique hotels he launched in his native California in 1987. Now, he is ready to put his urbane and playful stamp on hotels outside the Golden State. Armed with an approach based on the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow and a hefty financial commitment from Hyatt scion John Pritzker’s Geolo Capital, Conley is looking to acquire hotels in the western U.S., Hawaii, Manhattan, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Miami.
Hotel guestrooms in 2025 will be flexible, customizable homes away from home for guests as consumers become more inclined to travel lightly and combine multiple purposes for trips. In a general session called “In the Year 2025—Future Trends/Bold Predictions” at the Hotel Investment Conference Asia Pacific, panelists saw dramatic changes in store for hotels—beginning with guest communication.
Boutiques and branding were a big focus during the Lifestyle/Boutique Hotel Development Conference last week. The conference set independent against chain; lifestyle (which canny hotel veteran Richard Kessler suggested was lower-scale than 3- and 4-star boutiques) against boutique; owner-operator against franchisor. The networking was non-stop, but there was no news of deals, let alone a new brand. Sponsored by Lodging Hospitality magazine in association with HVS Hospitality Management, the event drew some 200, approximately 25 fewer than its 2009 debut.
Lifestyle hotels are the next generation of boutique hotels. Driven by the chains, they borrow the best elements of boutiques – small, intimate and modern – and throw in advantages only a chain can offer, like loyalty perks, consistency and economies of scale. As a result, lifestyle hotels are generally more affordable and accessible than boutiques – and soon to be ubiquitous.