Archive for the ‘Hotel Business’ Category
How to Hotel
Thursday, March 11th, 2010As a boutique hotelier going on two dozen years, I’m constantly struck by how many otherwise sensible folks imagine getting into this 24/7/365 life of servitude. I’ve met many savvy investors and celebrities who were passionate about creating their little dream hotel or resort, only to find out it was more financially (and emotionally) rewarding closed than opened. And I’ve met countless restauranteurs and nightclub promoters who somehow see boutique hotels as grad school for serving the needs of the terminally hip.
The wisest are those that just ruminate about the subject. Moby created an album named Hotel based upon his fascination with the nature of these nests for global nomads, where humans can spend significant portions of their lives, but have all traces of their tenancy removed for the next guests. And, then today I happened upon Tyler Brule’s thought-provoking Monocle periodical in JFK airport with the cover story about what makes for a spectacular hotel (you know Tyler, he’s the style maven who created the magazine of the 90s, Wallpaper).
The highlight of this deep dive into hostelry was philosopher Alain de Botton’s essay:
A good hotel is an embodiment of the act of love: love understood as the commitment to the wholehearted care of another human being. The ideal hotel would for a time manage to satisfy with the utmost intelligence all the needs, physical as well as mental of its clientele…Bad design is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of architecture…The hotels we love are the work of those rare hoteliers with the humility to adequately interrogate themselves about their desires and their tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into logical plans — a combination that enables them to create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously knew we even had.
Wow, Abe Maslow couldn’t have said it any better.
While the words “love” and “hotel” usually conjure up the image of a Japanese flophouse where one pays by the hour, it is reassuring to read this modern day philosopher’s perspective on how to be a great hotelier. At a time when our industry is under siege and something like a quarter to half of American hotels are in technical default with their lenders, it’s heartening to be reminded that a healthy bottom-line isn’t just the result of skillful financial engineering. A great hotelier — especially in this modern age with rapidly changing travel tastes and needs — is one-part cultural anthropologist, one-part psychologist, one-part circus showman, and one-part humble servant. But, more than anything else, the premiere hoteliers know that it comes back to anticipating and serving people’s expected and unrecognized needs. But, just delivering on guests’ needs alone doesn’t capture the magic that makes a hotel legendary. Joan Didion once wrote, “Of course, great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.” How true, and, yet, until recently, most of the world’s largest hotel chains thought that the mirror we wanted was purely banal predictability with the Hilton in Austin feeling no different than the one in Boston. Road warriors like George Clooney in Up in the Air want consistency but they also want a sense of place with a soul. Aldous Huxley once suggested, “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.” And, dead describes most big chain hotel lobbies. Compare that with the Peabody in Memphis or the new Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking district of New York. Great hotels have always been a reflection of place and they provide the ultimate civic living room for locals to mix it up with visitors.
So, a big thank you to Alain de Botton for reminding me why I called my odd little company “joie de vivre.” How many companies do you know that chose their name to also be their mission statement? Creating joy for hotel guests (and employees) and creating a spirit of “joie de vivre” in our communal living room is a noble goal and one that will continue to be relevant in good times and bad.
Room Service & The Emotional Connection
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007One of my friends once reminded me, “The moment you give up the expectation that things (or people) will be perfect is the moment when your life will be so much happier.” Good advice…maybe it’s something we should remind our hotel guests.
I had a less than perfect experience in a hotel recently that I thought I’d share. I don’t like to beat up on my fellow hoteliers as, God knows, there are enough customers with a little extra emotional baggage who are world-classin their “beating up” skills. But, I thought my recent experience at the Anaheim Marriott was instructive.
Marriott is a fine company–sort of boring, but they usually get the details right and they have a long and rich history of being very employee- and customer-focused. I’m here in the Disney orbit to make a keynote speech at the Southern California Hotel & Lodging Conference. So, I order room service this morning and the server shows up efficiently–but unfortunately while I’m in the shower. I rush out to get the door, looking for a bathrobe….you’ve got to believe that a four-star hotel like this has bathrobe, right? No bathrobe. I show up at the front door in a towel. The room service attendant gives me an odd look and asks if he can enter the room. I apologize for showing so much skin and mention that I couldn’t find a bathrobe. He says tersely, “you’ll have to call housekeeping…I don’t know why we don’t have bathrobes.” I look at the $20 skimpy parfait and small tumbler of orange juice (I know, I know, room service is painfully expensive at nearly all hotels…I’m sorry) and look at the bill a little more closely. I see there’s a 20% service charge, which is fine, but there’s also a $2.50 delivery charge. I ask the attendant why are they charging a delivery charge for room service as it should be built into the prices. He sheepishly says “I guess we’re just trying to make as much money as possible.” Of course, when I read the room service menu bleery-eyed, I’d missed the very small print that did say they charge for both delivery and gratuity. OK, OK, a hotelier shouldn’t complain about such things but this attendant really seemed to have no care about my bathrobe request or delivery charge inquiry.
So, now I sit here with the bed throw over my shoulders writing this musing. I’m remembering back to last night when I checked in and the passive and socially disconnected front desk clerk gave me a robotic overview of the hotel. I asked about Wi-Fi and was amazed to find out this behemoth of a convention hotel doesn’t have it. Found out they charge $10 for an internet connection (most of our hotels don’t charge, but I think the strangest irony is that more expensive hotels charge for the connection while less expensive hotels don’t…for example, I don’t think Marriott Courtyard charges but the more expensive full-service Marriott’s do…this doesn’t make sense). Long story short, this hotel–from its
1980’s-style armoire in the guest room to its artwork that looks like it was purchased at Wal-Mart to the complete lack of warmth I’ve seen in the staff–shows that much of the hotel industry has devolved into one big personality-less transaction. Fortunately, my keynote address today is about how the boutique hotel segment of the industry is giving the big chains a run for their money…based upon my experience here at the Marriott, I’m confident about our prospects.
I want to segue into talking about the emotional connection that is created with customers. We are launching a new Joie de Vivre Hotels website tomorrow that’s pretty revolutionary. It’s all about engaging in a relationship with our customers. It’s not just the new graphics (although I love the new logo signifying the Joie de Vivre heart). It’s the California Connect part of our site (very Web 2.0) where people can connect with each other based upon common interests revolving around the California travel experience. Check out the cool People Map that allows you to see which people in the JDV online community are most similar to you and how you can learn interesting hidden treasures from them. Of course, we still have Yvette the Hotel Matchmaker, but she’s now a person and not a cartoon. She still provides a mass customized method of connecting you to the hotels, locals, and things to do that perfectly fit your personality. Our “JDV Gives” portion of the site allows you to understand which specific grassroots non-profits each of our hotels supports (each General Manager has annual philanthropic giveaway goals just like they have net income goals). All in all, this website is really about creating a community around how to experience California in a way that ideally suits who you are.
Since the dawning of hotel websites a decade ago, hotels have gotten better and better at making their product look good on the web…better graphics, better reservations capabilities, better information. But, in many ways, most hotels are stuck in the thinking that their website is just an electronic brochure and booking engine. Once again, they’re too focused on just the transaction, not the relationship. A few hotel companies have tried to move beyond the transaction. Sheraton has spent $20 million on their new “belong” campaign and what they consider to be a Web 2.0 website, yet from what I can see, all the website does is allow guests to upload photos of their experiences at a Sheraton along with their brief description of their time at the hotel and in the city. It’s just a more personal approach to the transaction — it’s definitely not truly creating community. Furthermore, Hilton launched an expensive and glitzy PR campaign around their new slogan “BE HOSPITABLE.” Those marching orders haven’t resonated all that well as I don’t see a new Hilton-focused community naturally rising up around this mantra. It just feels like some failed attempt to try and make a huge worldwide transaction-driven company look a little more personal.
OK, enough of my ranting. In sum, people aren’t stupid and they know what’s authentic and what’s not (an interesting observation given that I’m in the shadow of the Magic Castle here in Anaheim). The real magic is in how you create a culture that truly cares. Southwest Airlines has done it. Whole Foods Market has done it. Starbucks has done it. But, all these big hotel chains seem to be putting more energy and money into how they can look like they are personal and emotionally connected to you when, in fact, they aren’t investing in their people and culture to assure that this is true on a person-to-person basis with their customers.