The Greatest Challenge of Any Luxury Hotelier

The greatest challenge of any luxury hotelier is without any doubt change. Not change itself, but the hesitation to let go of the status quo and the past, and to embrace the future… to embrace the future and with that to stay relevant.

At every single luxury hotel I worked so far, employees would always tell me about the golden past, how everything was better years ago and how things are going down nowadays. They would tell me about the sumptuous flower bouquets in every guest room, the abundance of luxury amenities, and how money didn’t matter. How our guests would all be dressed in the finest suits and dresses, and how glamorous and ostentatious everything was. With the words of Bob Dylan the times they are a changin’… you cannot stop change.

Our guests don’t define luxury in material goods like flowers and amenities anymore, they define it by experiencing and collecting enriching experiences. They define luxury with service that goes beyond.

My wife and I visited the W Koh Samui on our vacation to Thailand at the beginning of the year, and while the hotel was fantastic, it’s not the breathtaking view, nor our amazingly beautiful villa with the private pool, and the fine dining restaurant we keep talking about, it’s the service that stayed in our memories long after our departure. Unfortunately my wife got food poisoning from the food at the airport and got sick as soon as we arrived at the property. In the evening while we we’re trying to eat a little at the restaurant and hoping for her to get better, the waiter noticed that she didn’t feel well and offered assistance.

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W Retreat Koh Samui

While he wasn’t able to help himself, he right away got the director of rooms, who arranged the hotel limousine for us and asked one of his employees to escort us to the hospital to stay with us until we would return to the property later that night. Once my wife got better and we came back to the hotel, they arranged some porridge in our villa with a note for her to get better soon. We felt that the hotel truly cared about us, and that we built a connection with the people working there.

While this wasn’t exactly the experience we were looking for when planning our trip to Koh Samui, the hotel took this opportunity to go beyond and we cannot stop talking to our friends about how wonderful the stay was us (we almost forget about the food poisoning and the hospital experience).

Things that were so important for our guests staying in a luxury hotel only a decade ago, don’t matter so much anymore, and it requires much more now to deliver a top-notch service. It’s not as easy as placing flowers in a guest room anymore to impress a guest, but employees that strive to understand who you are as an individual and cater to your needs and preferences. The guest staying in our Presidential Suite is not the one wearing an Armani suite and expensive dress shoes anymore, now it could be the guy with a baseball hat, ripped jeans and flip-flops who spends the most money at your hotel.

Your employees need to let go of what was defining for luxury so long ago, and need to reinvent themselves to stay relevant. If we keep holding on to what we think is so important we’re going to be history soon, just like so many other companies that were leading their industries ten years ago and that no one is talking about anymore… because they stood still and the world passed by them. Who remembers Smith-Corona type writers or Wang computers? Both were industry leaders who filed for bankruptcy, because they were trying to hold on to what made them successful years ago… and the world passed by them.

I believe that Rick Warren says it best with relevance is a choice, and that we should honor the past of our companies, but not be prisoners of it.

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