If panelists and speakers at the International Luxury Hotel Association’s conference this week are any indication, hoteliers are not easing their attention on “authenticity” any time soon, but “emotional” – as in, an emotional connection to and from guests – is coming up fast.
“This is the new paradigm,” said Isabelle Mical, communications director of Relais & Chateaux. Mical, who joined the company four years ago, has a background in luxury brands including Veuve Clicquot and Coty, and brings a customer-focused retail sensibility to Relais, an association of nearly 600 small independent hotels.
Arguably, these hotels – from chateaux to tented camps, ryokans, mansions, ranches and farms in 60 countries – live in the sweet spot for luxury hospitality: independent, unique, and yes, authentic, with an average size of 28 rooms and often very little in common with each other beyond the intangibles of good hospitality – more “how does it feel” than “did you get your drink in three minutes,” says Daniel Hostettler, president of Relais & Chateaux North America and president and group managing director at OHM Collection, a portfolio of small luxury hotels in New England (also part of Relais).
The association’s campaign to showcase its unique properties, “Delicious Journeys,” is decidedly emotional: short films with minimal dialogue that create a strong connection to a property. There are about 100 at this point, Mical said, with more being worked on, conceived primarily by the property and executed by the association.
Hostettler and Mical spoke more about that campaign and other priorities during a conversation with HOTELS at the ILHA conference, held at the Four Seasons Miami.
HOTELS: Is “emotional” the new buzzword? How do you know it when you encounter it?
Isabelle Mical: We are a collection of 600 different personalities. It was a long, long, long way to find a platform where each single hotel can express itself. I believe that we found it with this (“Delicious Journeys”) expression, because it means something for anyone on this planet, from New Zealand to Canada to the U.S. We believe that with this platform, any of our members, and any of our clients, can say something or express something.
Daniel Hostettler: Those are very emotional videos, but also very specific to those individual properties.
H: You don’t see much of the properties themselves.
DH: You saw almost nothing of the properties, which is pretty neat.
IM: Where we can have an added value as an association is with this campaign – to give a light to a hotel in a different perspective. We believe that this is the way to go because today, having a monolithic conversation – nobody hears that. There are too many things going on. People need to express themselves. Look at the youth with social media, the way they keep on looking at themselves. People are very self-centric. So you need to give them the possibility to express themselves… It’s a total change in communication.
DH: I always say that I think Relais started about 62 years ago, and we were on trend before we knew we were on trend because now everything that millennials want is a sense of place, authentic, emotional, not cookie-cutter – we’ve been doing that for 62 years, before we knew it was cool… The (properties) are so individual, but how do you make sure people know the (Relais) brand? In North America, the challenge we face is that people know Blackberry Farm, or they know Le Bernardin, or Jean-Georges, or Thomas Keller or French Laundry, but they don’t necessarily equate them all with Relais & Chateaux.
H: Do you want them to be recognized as being part of Relais & Chateaux?
DH: They’re independently owned, so obviously each property is all about that property, but at the same time we want to share to the consumer that loves Jean-Georges or that goes to Blackberry Farm, because they love Tennessee, but maybe when they’re in Rhode Island, they stay with us at Ocean House… Every single one of them has a different experience, and yet the tagline at the end (of the short films) talks about the 580 properties. It is this sort of – again, what happened 62 years ago, a small collection of hoteliers that were sharing guests with each other and the guests knew that if I sent you to her hotel, you’d be in good hands. And that’s really the essence of the whole brand.
H: Isabelle, with your perspective from retail, what is the hospitality industry missing right now?
IM: I think there is room to improve on social media: I think we should push more to find ways to do something other than swimming pools. To be more human, to give voice to our clients. Social media is the big challenge today for all of us.
H: What’s your biggest goal to accomplish for next year as an association?
DH: Addressing sustainability is on our list. For our properties, particularly in North America, we really want to try and be the first brand that gets rid of single-use plastic bottles. That’s a challenge because at the luxury level, we’re all a little afraid that if you don’t change the sheets every day, if you don’t change the towels every day, if you don’t give the guest everything that they traditionally think of as luxury, you’re going to be punished, but I think the world is changing, and it will be an interesting test case to go first with our properties … to see if we get pushback at the thousand dollar a night rate. Hopefully, if we don’t, our fellow properties in North America and the rest of the world will follow.
But it’s something that Relais is passionate about… At the luxury end, I think most of us were checked out. It wasn’t high on our list as operators, and I don’t know that it’s high on the list of the consumer at the moment, but it will be. So we’re always trying to be ahead of the curve, and it’s going to be a big year for that.
Everyone is trying to figure out what sustainability looks like in the hospitality business. That statistic we all heard (at the conference) that we have to cut 66% of our carbon footprint in 10 years – that’s scary. That’s a lot. That’s a big ask for an industry that really hasn’t been that good about sustainability as a whole.
In Africa, we lead the way and we can learn a lot as a brand, because if you speak to those hoteliers, they’re filtering their own water and they’re off the grid with solar and they’re giving back and educating the local inhabitants to be in the hospitality business, and they’re protecting the animals, and it’s the whole focus of the properties we have in that part of the world. One of the benefits of the association is the ability to meet those other people and find out what they are doing and how do we transfer that into a less remote application.