Why the best luxury hotels don’t sell exclusivity — They build connection

Luxury is losing its obsession with exclusivity.

The most memorable hotels aren’t winning because they keep guests apart. They’re winning because they create moments that bring people together.

Today’s travelers aren’t just looking for a beautiful room or a private escape. They’re looking for connection, belonging, and experiences that stay with them long after checkout.

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director, EMEA at Revinate, sits down with Lily Wecker, CEO of Aethos, to discuss how the meaning of luxury is evolving and why the future of hospitality is becoming more human.

Tune in to discover why the future of luxury hospitality isn’t just about where guests stay. It’s about how they feel when they leave.

Meet your host

Karen Stephens

As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships. Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com

As the host of The Hotel Moment podcast, she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading our global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.

Dylan Cole

Dylan began his career as a TV personality in South Korea. He then brought his love for travel and technology to Revinate where he played a vital part in establishing Revinate’s position in the US market, followed by the Asia Pacific region and now in Europe. Dylan is currently the Managing Director of Revinate Europe and is based in Amsterdam.

Watch the video

Transcript

[00:00:00] Lily Wecker: A lot of consumers really are now seeking experiences as real luxury, are seeing luxury as something much more internal validation. And this is very much something that Aethos and myself believe in, where luxury should be ultimately meaningful and genuine connections with yourself and how you exist in this world as well.

[00:00:27] Karen Stephens: Welcome to the Hotel Moment Podcast, presented by Revinate. I’m Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer, joining you from sunny San Francisco, California.

[00:00:35] Dylan Cole: And I’m Dylan Cole, Managing Director of Revinate.

[00:00:40] Karen Stephens: This is the podcast where we explore how technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. And more importantly, how the right technology delivers real outcomes for hotel teams and guests alike.

[00:00:50] Dylan Cole: From revenue strategy and guest communication to operations and marketing, we sit down with the people transforming hospitality around the world.

[00:00:59] Karen Stephens: Depending on the conversation, sometimes it’ll just be me behind the mic.

[00:01:02] Dylan Cole: And sometimes it’ll be me, bringing a European perspective and stories from across the global hospitality industry.

[00:01:09] Karen Stephens: Whether you’re a hotelier, a tech enthusiast, or just curious about where hospitality is headed, you’re in the right place.

[00:01:15] Dylan Cole: Let’s get into it. Welcome to the Hotel Moment. Today we’re excited to welcome Lily Wecker, Chief Executive Officer of Aethos, a next generation hospitality brand focused on experiential luxury, meaningful connection and wellness-driven travel. Lily’s background spans luxury hospitality, brand development, and growth strategy, including leadership experience at Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. Across her career, she has focused on building brands that go beyond simply selling rooms, creating experiences that feel deeply personal, emotionally resonant, and culturally connected. Today she joins us to talk about the future of hospitality, human-centered luxury, storytelling, guest connection, and how hotels can create experiences people genuinely want to be a part of. So without further ado, hey Lily, thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. How are you?

[00:02:10] Lily Wecker: Thanks for having me, Dylan. Great to be here.

[00:02:12] Dylan Cole: It’s our pleasure. And how’s life? How’s things?

[00:02:15] Lily Wecker: Yeah, it’s going phenomenal. We had our latest opening in London, a standalone restaurant called Mitsu — East London meets East Tokyo — just less than three months ago, and it’s making headline news, it’s generating a ton of buzz. We’re seeing a very strong pickup. So no, we’ve been keeping busy and doing really well.

[00:02:36] Dylan Cole: I know, I feel like I gotta get a closer friendship with you. I saw the pictures online. I need to get my invite. It looked really cool. I saw all the photos you posted on LinkedIn.

[00:02:45] Lily Wecker: Thank you, Dylan. Well, you’re in Amsterdam, so visit us anytime. Our doors are open.

[00:02:51] Dylan Cole: I’ll have to take you up on it. But no, it really did look cool, and congrats on the new opening. So I always like to start off with one question. This is kind of a personal thing. I hope the audience likes it too, but outside of your properties in your portfolio, which you have a great selection of properties, what’s your favorite hotel in the world and why?

[00:03:10] Lily Wecker: That’s a tough one. There’s so many. I think if I have to pick one, and I don’t know if the hotel is still open today, to be honest, Dylan, but for my honeymoon now almost ten years ago, we went to the Maldives to an independent local hotel called Ozen. It was shortly after business school, my husband and I were over the moon, and after three different weddings around the world we finally earned our honeymoon in the Maldives, and it was exceptional because of how we really embraced that holiday. We were fully present for two weeks for each other, to experience the island, as you know the Maldives is generally a single island resort, and I had some of my best memories made there. You know, going back to experience for what you really remember, it was exceptional.

[00:04:02] Dylan Cole: They do know how to put it on with hospitality in the Maldives like no other. It’s a very special place. Not a cheap vacation either, but it definitely is worthwhile for something like a honeymoon or something special like that.

[00:04:15] Lily Wecker: Exactly. It’s once in a lifetime. You swim with the little sharks, the safe ones, and you feel like your life experience has all of a sudden opened up to a wilder spectrum when you’re in that kind of environment.

[00:04:30] Dylan Cole: Cool. Well, thanks for your answer on that. I know I put you on the spot.

[00:04:33] Lily Wecker: No, no, it’s all great. It’s a good question because I do get asked a lot. I tend to recommend Aethos, of course.

[00:04:39] Dylan Cole: And that’s why I always put the caveat of like not in your portfolio, so that I can take that pressure off of you.

[00:04:44] Lily Wecker: And our hotels — actually Sardinia in particular — host a lot of honeymooners, so I expect very similar sentiments and memories being made in Sardinia.

[00:04:55] Dylan Cole: For sure. I’ve stayed at your property in Milan, by the way. I had a wonderful stay there, and I went there with my family and my wife, and I had a nice date night in the bar that evening, and it was a really good experience. And it was a great part of town too for being able to walk around and shop as well.

[00:05:11] Lily Wecker: Thank you, Dylan. Absolutely. I call it like the sexy dating spot, right? No matter how early or late you’re going back to the room, you have to pass by the Doping bar. That’s how the hotel was built. That’s what we would like you to do. And it’s absolutely a great melting pot for our guests and our members.

[00:05:30] Dylan Cole: Yep, I can attest to it. And so I wanted to shift a little bit into kind of your experience — I mean, you’ve worked at some iconic luxury brands, you now work more with a next-generational experiential brand, you’ve worked in different settings within hospitality — but what drew you into hospitality in the first place?

[00:05:52] Lily Wecker: Well, I started my career in management consulting, so I’ve always, from the very beginning, traveled heavily. I used to travel Monday to Thursday every week to client sites and spent the majority of the week in a hotel. I always had this natural curiosity for learning about a new location. You have that intrinsic curiosity and appreciation for hospitality wherever you go. And that’s initially what drove me into the industry when I had the opportunity. Now I think over time it has become a lot more meaningful and special, more purpose-driven for me, to see hospitality as a platform to create real change.

[00:06:30] Dylan Cole: And when you think about that, what drove you to start recognizing that it was more than just rooms and service? The rooms and service are maybe the platform, but like the rest is experience and all the other things you can build upon it. So was there a moment or something that brought you to that realization?

[00:06:47] Lily Wecker: So a few years ago I had a bit of a health challenge that forced me to slow down and take a step back. I also at that point started therapy, and it’s when I discovered mindfulness, mind-body connection, and the fact that there’s bigger things in life than accomplishing the next thing, that goal-seeking mentality. And I think that kind of triggered essentially an internal process, a reflection process, to think about what I can do with what I know now, through what I contribute at work. And wherever I am — this is even before my current role — that’s when I started thinking about hospitality differently. It’s when I started thinking about how I was able to implement certain aspects of, say, introspection or community building into designing the products. So that the product is not just brick and mortar. The product can lead to something more, like a sense of belonging, so something more emotional and less physical and tangible. And I think that essentially started a few years back, after that period of a break.

[00:07:52] Dylan Cole: Sounds like you had an experience that probably wasn’t that enjoyable for you, but you’ve taken it and turned it into something quite positive in your life, and it’s actually now driving you in your current role. It’s pretty admirable.

[00:08:07] Lily Wecker: Thank you, Dylan. I would say it’s a realization that you can do more to prevent somebody else falling off the cliff. Right, if you’re operating so close to the cliff, you’re always pushing boundaries, then at some point somebody — if not yourself, but people around you — will fall off the cliff. And some people don’t recover. You see individuals who experience burnout that never recover from it. I would say I’m very fortunate that I’m in a position to come back to the industry, to actually be in a position to do things differently and follow my new purpose.

[00:08:41] Dylan Cole: So Lily, I want to shift gears a little bit, but if I just think about your career, you’ve worked in different varieties of hospitality, but now with your brand’s big focus on mind, body, and soul, how would you say your definition of luxury and hospitality has evolved throughout your career, and where are you at with it now?

[00:09:01] Lily Wecker: Great question. I certainly view it both as a consumer, and I think that my experience over time, my relationship with how I experience luxury, very much resonates with how the world over time has experienced luxury in the past few decades. I think in the beginning we seek luxury as some kind of material gain, a sense of ownership of stuff. It can be a bag, a car, a watch, and whatnot. And it’s really around owning something that other people want and can’t have, and a feeling that you’re superior to the person next door. It’s ultimately tied to external validation, if you think about that relationship you have with the world. We have, in a lot of papers and reports, validation that we have experienced this change in the world, where a lot of consumers really are now seeking experiences as real luxury, are seeing luxury as something much more internal validation. And this is very much something that Aethos and myself believe in, where luxury should be ultimately meaningful and genuine connections with yourself, and how you exist in this world as well — so with nature, with your friends and family, and with new friends that you will meet down the line. That kind of internal, anchored piece with your full self, I would say, is our new definition of luxury, and it’s what Aethos wants to bring to this world.

[00:10:29] Dylan Cole: I love it. I think about the pressure in the world today, and maybe it’s slowing down with new generations, but it’s always been, especially with social media, “look at my vacation.” I mean, is this vacation for you, or is it to show off to your friends? And after a while, I think that stuff starts to become stressful and it makes it not enjoyable — and the idea of actually paying to be in a better state of mind and to feel good after the vacation, to actually feel like you had a vacation.

[00:10:57] Lily Wecker: It’s exhausting, right? Seeking external validation, that instant validation that you get from the likes on social media platforms — it’s exhausting. And you’re spot on, Dylan, if you instead focus on internal validation as a source of joy, then luxury is about those moments where you’re truly present and you have that connection with yourself.

[00:11:22] Dylan Cole: Are there certain demographics of people, or age groups, or just different folks that you’re seeing more lately that are starting to light up to this type of experience? Have you seen anything that the audience would find interesting on that?

[00:11:38] Lily Wecker: Yeah, so we welcome everyone. We’re family-friendly, life-friendly, you know, all stages of life welcome. What we have found is that our products resonate very well with Gen Z and Millennials. Over half of our guests and members today — so the majority of them — are younger than forty years old. And obviously this is a hypothesis, but our belief is that this Gen Z generation, which grew up with a lot of saturated content on the internet and grew up with social media in their, I guess, childhood and teenage years — this group of people are particularly feeling this modern loneliness. This idea of constant comparison, a lot of information, but very little real relationships. You can have a thousand friends on Facebook, but how many friends can you call to take care of your cats, water your plants, right? And I don’t use Facebook anymore, but I think that’s an evolution I myself have gone through.

[00:12:39] Dylan Cole: Yeah, that’s cool, really interesting. And your brand does a great job with marketing — it’s very well done. And I wanted to ask you, first of all I know you have a great marketing team, but I’m sure you’re quite involved in how the marketing looks and the branding, positioning. And as somebody who is involved in this, do you have an opinion on marketing in this industry? Is there anything that you think some others might disagree with?

[00:13:02] Lily Wecker: A few other brands follow our philosophy, but not the majority, I would say. Aethos treats marketing very much emotion-led. So we very much focus on the emotions that we want to evoke first, then the products that we’re trying to sell. Because if you think about Aethos’s philosophy and our mission to bring more people together, to connect better, that end product, that end goal, should be a feeling rather than a room or a great meal. So yes, you see rooms and food in our campaigns, but they’re frequently not the main highlights of our imagery or our video content. The majority of our marketing content is built around a feeling that we’re trying to invoke, an emotion. And that emotion can be about a sense of joy from sharing a great meal with family. And that image can be a family having a great meal together — happens to be at an Aethos property — but the feeling is more important than highlighting the fixtures of that restaurant. Same with rooms.

[00:14:08] Dylan Cole: Thanks, Lily. It’s been great so far. So I wanted to ask you — we’ve started to see sort of a shift with lifestyle luxury brands moving towards larger spaces, maybe fewer rooms, and trying to drive more of a privacy-driven experience for their guests. Why do you think we’re seeing that in the industry? Is there any kind of reason that comes to mind for you, where we’re starting to see that direction?

[00:14:32] Lily Wecker: Yeah, so density is a big subject, and it’s something that I would say initially probably started with Aman leading the way, but many traditional luxury brands today are going lower and lower in density. There is absolutely a sense of privacy and exclusivity that comes with being in a low-density development project, a low-density space, where you feel that you’re secluded, that you’re in a little cocoon, and you get that privacy when you’re staying, say, with your family, for instance. Now that logic very much applies to a certain segment of travelers, but it’s actually against what we are trying to promote at Aethos when it comes to connecting people. So we actively design our projects to be high density, and we call it high emotional density, to create spaces that are close to each other and give you an opportunity for serendipity. An example being the lobby area should be open, and there should be F&B outlets in the lobby area, so that people can engage with the space and can meet new people. Another example — we discussed Milan earlier — another example is the Doping bar’s location at Aethos Milan. It’s intentionally set in a location where you have to walk by the dopamine bar, you have to say hi to Nicola, our brilliant bar manager, and maybe consider a nightcap, before you go back to your room. It’s a place where a lot of people from different walks of life mingle. In Milan we also have a private members’ club, so members also meet there. And we want to create spaces, indoor or outdoors, that allow people to just meet and gather. And you don’t get that kind of opportunity if your main offering is all about privacy and exclusivity, being a low density space.

[00:16:29] Dylan Cole: Right. So it’s like striking that balance — you get that privacy when you need it and when you want it, but to get to your privacy, you do need to walk through these more community areas and get people connected, but then they have their space when they need that, right?

[00:16:44] Lily Wecker: Totally. Some of our space design includes a meditation corner. It’s not actually like you go and meditate only, but it’s more like a space where you can pause a little. You can rest. There’s a lounge, it’s comfortable, you can have refreshments. We call it a meditation corner, but really it’s just a space for you to be.

[00:17:02] Dylan Cole: Be you, and get what you need. Yep, I get it. So I want to ask you maybe a few closing questions here. So when you look ahead, what do you hope hospitality feels more like in five to ten years from now? And not just for guests, but also for employees too — what does that look like?

[00:17:22] Lily Wecker: So for guests, and I would say the general public, Aethos exists because we believe in experiential hospitality, experiential lifestyle. However, experiential lifestyle is still very much limited to a niche audience today. In five to ten years’ time, if Aethos does well and our competitors do well, together our hope is that experiential lifestyle — this ability to enjoy experiences beyond a bed and a table — will allow more people to learn about themselves and have a happier and fuller life. That’s the end goal. So that experiential lifestyle is no longer a niche, it’s an option for anybody to access at different price points as well, so it’s not only a luxury product. For our employees, something that we genuinely believe in and very much practice is a human-to-human approach. So we’re proponents — I mean, this is very much rooted in our core values — we’re a proponent of peer-to-peer service and relationship between employees, members, and our guests. A lot of traditional brands, and of course countries and cultures in the world, value hierarchy as part of their social construct, and we acknowledge and respect that, but at Aethos we very much embrace and embody a sense of diversity, inclusion, and equality. And that really shows when, say, an employee feels comfortable and confident to walk up to you and strike up a conversation based on what you’re wearing. An example is at one point I was having dinner wearing flip-flops with Brazilian flags, and an employee came over and said, “Oh, I’m from Brazil, have you been to Brazil?” And that’s how we started talking. And that happens between everyone — employees, guests, and members — because we want to create, again, that emotional density, the space for people to meet and learn new things and explore.

[00:19:23] Dylan Cole: And do you see that in the feedback that you get too, where a lot of employees are mentioned by name, and they’re actually calling out these interactions?

[00:19:30] Lily Wecker: Yes, absolutely. I mean, if you look at the publicly available Google reviews, the Expedia reviews — absolutely.

[00:19:37] Dylan Cole: All right, Lily, I have one last question for you. So if guests leave one of your properties and they could only have one feeling or an emotional takeaway that they bring home with them, what would you hope that is?

[00:19:51] Lily Wecker: I have to say it’s a sense of belonging, a feeling of being seen in a deep way, I would say.

[00:19:58] Dylan Cole: All right, Lily, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. I hope you did as well.

[00:20:05] Lily Wecker: Likewise, Dylan, thanks for having me.

[00:20:07] Dylan Cole: Absolutely. And best of luck with your busy season, and talk to you soon.

[00:20:11] Lily Wecker: Thank you. You’re welcome to visit us anytime, Dylan. Thanks.

[00:20:19] Outro: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.

Media Contact

Media Team

Media team | Revinate [email protected] +1 415 671 4703