How Ace Hotel Delivers Authenticity in the Age of Automation

In this opinion piece, brand veteran Darren Paul explores how the hotel brand balances digitized and analog customer experiences to exceed guests' expectations.

Authenticity is real. It cannot be manufactured, or fabricated, or solved for through a marketing brief, or an influencer campaign. Authenticity, or being authentic, starts from the beginning, and carries through the inside and outside of a being, human, business, or otherwise.

In a lengthy conversation on an uncharacteristically sunny winter day, Brad Wilson, President of Ace Hotels, huddled in his cozy office inside the Ace NYC to talk about the brand and how it thinks about technology, design, creativity and the customer.

The result of Brad and his team's hard work has yielded a business spanning the globe, with Ace Hotels in ten growing cities, and two new brands, Sister City and Maison de la Luz, launched in the past two years addressing specific customer needs.