The extent and variety of personal experience offerings is a rapidly accelerating trend in the hotel industry, especially in the luxury segment. It’s something I have discussed with hotel owners and operators for more than 30 years.
When my girlfriend at the time, now wife, and I first visited China in 1992, we stayed at several renowned hotels in Shanghai, Beijing and Xi’an. At each property, we asked our hosts to arrange three personal experiences for us: a calligraphy lesson to learn how to write our names in Hanzi, a traditional Chinese cooking class and a masterclass on the board game “Go,” which I had recently been introduced to by a Korean graduate student. None of the hotels was able to accommodate these requests, with the lone exception of a visit to a Go school for children in Shanghai.
As a result, I have no memory of the hotels where I stayed. Clearly, this represented an opportunity for hotels looking to create long-term relationships with their guests via personalized immersive experiences that would create memories for a lifetime. Since that trip, I have consistently encouraged hotel owners and operators, through my classes and seminars, to think more intentionally about this potential. Three primary forces are driving this shift: marketplace changes, brand commoditization and opportunities for ancillary revenue generation.
Marketplace Changes
From a customer perspective, especially in luxury hotels, research tells us that ‘owning’ the guests’ entire travel journey (transportation, transfers, rooms, food and beverage, activities, experiences, etc.) is central to creating high-quality and high-value memorable experiences. This is why Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, for example, offers branded local transfers from airports, ports and train stations, as well as access to its private jet. Also, because hotels today have a lot of data on their guests, they can personalize experiences like never before.
From a competitive standpoint, platforms such as Airbnb are doubling down on experiences. In response, hotels are pushing back by developing distinctive, hotel-led experiences of their own.
Brand Commoditization
With more than 1,000 hotel brands worldwide competing for every room night, brand commoditization has become a defining challenge. To stand out in this ‘sea of sameness,’ brand leaders are increasingly turning to personalized experiences as a means of differentiation, to help create demand, price and loyalty premium.
Ancillary Revenue Opportunities
Creating new experience opportunities for in-house guests to spend their money on gives hotels additional sources of ancillary revenue. Guests are happy because this in-house offering puts a stamp of quality on the experience, akin to buying a shore excursion from a cruise brand rather than at the port from a third-party operator. Hotels benefit because such offerings help maximize a critical performance metric: revenue per available guest or RevPAG.
Some of my favorite examples:
- Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London offers guests private shopping hours at Harrods, London’s iconic department store.
- The Ritz-Carlton, Dubai arranges exclusive tours to the top of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
- The Leela Palace New Delhi offers hands-on pastry-making experiences; it once offered my then 16-year-old son—an aspiring hotelier—one.
- At LUX* Resorts in Mauritius I was invited to plant a sapling on the property, one I could nurture into a fully grown tree over subsequent visits.
After 46 years in the hotel business, 36 years teaching at Cornell University, working with more than 15,000 students across over 100 countries, collaborating with global hotel companies and drawing on extensive research, I have distilled what I believe to be a seven-part formula for creating truly engaging and memorable hotel experiences:
- Novel: New matters. Originality counts.
- Quality: The experience should be accretive to the brand—polishing it, not tarnishing it.
- Value: The guest’s investment of time and money should deliver a meaningful payoff.
- Curated: Every element—location, materials, partners and staff—should be carefully assembled.
- Personalized: Tailored to the guest’s interests, preferences, attitudes and passions.
- Signature: Distinctive enough to become a brand standard or scalable across the portfolio.
- Proprietary: Protected intellectual property that is difficult to replicate—whether through trademarked experiences or exclusive partnerships (e.g., co-branding the experience with a luxury brand like Mandarin and Harrod’s).
Ultimately, hotels that understand this will secure not only a repeating guest but a memorable story to be carried on for years to come.
Story contributed by Chekitan Dev, professor of hospitality business at Cornell University.