Bashar, Wali, thank you very much for joining us and welcome to the Insider Podcast.
Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me fresh off my cross the pond flight. So I will try to be witty as much as possible.
I’ll try to make sure I keep you awake despite the jet lag! So you’re a much traveled hospitality man and we’re going to obviously talk a little of that in a moment. But to get back to fundamentals, what is it about this business, this business of hospitality, which has captured you so completely?
You know, it’s a really interesting question. And I often, no offense, I’m here for a university podcast. I’m going to knock down the education about hospitality. I went to hotel school myself. And when I speak publicly, I’ll often say, okay, everyone in the room, I’m about to give you a Master’s degree in hospitality in about one minute, hear me out.
I grew up in the Middle East and we have a saying that goes, when a stranger shows up at your door, feed him for three days before you ask him who he is, where he’s from, or where he is going to. Because by then, he’ll either have the strength to answer or you’ll be such good friends, it won’t matter. And I sort of drop the mic and I say, congratulations, I just saved you half a million bucks. And really fundamentally at its heart, hospitality is just that. It’s the love of a stranger. And when you have that in you. It’s not work anymore. It’s something you pursue. It’s something you have. And, you know, often in the industry, I tell lots of young folks that are interested in the industry, I say you either have it or you don’t. There’s no wrong answer. It doesn’t matter. But if you don’t have it, if it’s not passion to you, don’t do it. And if you’re a person who doesn’t love to host and be sort of the Bon Vivant host of the soiree, this business is really not for you because that’s what it is all about.
One of the examples I use, as I literally, not figuratively, cannot remember once ever eating a meal alone at home with my own family, whereby, like, neighbors weren’t there, or relatives, or friends. So this idea of being together with other people, particularly around meals, to me, is that quintessential hospitality, and that’s really our job at the end of the day in a hotel, bring people together, give them an environment that energizes them and inspires them.
Yeah, and in terms of that passion, do you have to be in the business to realize you’ve got the passion or should you see some clues beforehand that actually, yeah, hospitality might be the route.
For me. You know, interesting. People think travel is hospitality. They say, oh, I love to travel. That’s not the same thing. Obviously, I remember going out with friends, you’d invite us to a party at your home and I’d show up with a friend and I would ditch the friend and would go around talking to people, making sure they’re having a good time. Hey, can I get you a drink? Do you need a seat? And the friend I’m with would say, it’s not your party. A, why are you taking over? And B, you’re a guest. Why are you pretending to be the host? There are telltale signs.
But look, we all have it in us, I think, because we are humans. At the end of the day, are pack animals. If you go Darwinian for a minute, we all want to be together. We needed each other to survive back in the day. And now we need each other to thrive. We all have it in different degrees. But I think we all have it in us, but some of us it comes naturally to others. It doesn’t. And I think you’ll know from your middle school, like at an early age, you’ll sort of… if you’re the person always trying to take care of everyone, trying to be sort of mother everyone, or father everyone, as it were. I think there are signs, but I’m not suggesting that everyone definitely can do it. To some it comes naturally, to others it doesn’t. But everyone can in fact do it. It’s not rocket science, as you know. Our business is not that complicated. If you understand at its heart, it’s a business of feelings, it’s not a business of design, it’s not a business of scent, it’s not a business of furniture, or walls, it’s business of feeling, it’s nebulous.
And we almost de-emphasize that because we wanna throw artifacts at it and we forget that at its heart it’s… my job is successful if I make you feel a certain way when you walk through the building that I have. Hotel, home, restaurant, bar, doesn’t matter where it is.
It still ultimately comes down to that human to human connection, regardless of all the paraphernalia that may be around, whatever the property.
100%. And interestingly enough, you’re starting to watch, to my satisfaction, restaurants back in the day, they’d say we’re in the restaurant business. Now they say we are in the hospitality business. I have friends that own office buildings and given the demise of office, people don’t want to be in offices anymore. They’re saying, how do we make offices be like hotels? And I say it’s not about having the coffee cart. It’s not all that stuff. It’s about giving someone a certain feeling when they walk in. And my proposition is that comes from other humans and how they make them feel. So the receptionist in an office building can either sit behind the counter, look at their phone, look up at you like you’re bothering them, or they literally can stand up, walk around the counter and say, welcome, good afternoon, what can I do for you? All of a sudden, the environment becomes less important because now I feel connected to you.
Clearly, look, design is important, scent is important. Lighting is the most important thing. But all those things in totality, without a human in the middle, become inconsequential. So that’s the idea, and I think I am delighted we’re all thinking about it the same way. Retail, think about a hospital, by the way, like a simple example. You are in your most vulnerable state. You’re going into a hospital. And what do you do when you first walk into a hospital? Spend 15 minutes, stressed out, going, where do I go? What arrow do I follow? So we’re watching hospitals now, at least in the US, trying to understand this concept because they get rated and the rating provides them funding, et cetera. So they’re hiring hotel people to say, let’s make the hospital lobby like a hotel lobby. Why isn’t there a concierge, not a person at the desk volunteering, but an actual concierge who would say, welcome, let me shepherd you to your destination.
Yeah. And we saw that a little bit, well, in offices, you mentioned offices just now, but I think with the rise, pre-demise of WeWork and some of those other brands, they were trying to bring in that kind of… not touchy feely, but that kind of customer experience as part of the office set up. I mean, I remember speaking to people in the real estate industry saying that’s the way forward. We’re making this more about the hospitality, the experience of being in that office, not just whether the fax machine works or, you know, the loos are blocked or whatever it is. It was about just the feeling of going to work in these places. Like I say, some of those brands sort of stalled a little bit. But I suppose that’s the same thing, isn’t it? It’s all about getting people feeling that emotional connection.
100%. And additionally, and I’m going to get philosophical on you here for a minute, there’s this idea again, like I mentioned in a Darwinian sense, we all want to be together. I actually trademarked the sentence ‘longing for belonging in hospitality’. We all now… like I have kids in at uni, they go to uni. I’m using the British slang, by the way, I hope I get some credit for it.
Yeah, absolutely!
So, they go to university and they may never come back, right? They may never come back home. And back in the day, people would leave, they’d come back. The family nucleus was strong and people would stick together geographically. They don’t anymore. We belonged to religion, we don’t anymore. We belong to political parties, we don’t any more. So, I feel like we’re all these lost humans looking for a place to belong. And the WeWork example that you gave, yes, touches on the hospitality, but the other thing it does is, now it tells me, hey, you found your community here is your tribe. You are now safe. Welcome to your tribe.
We talk about community, building community. It’s really more than that. It’s culture. And I love this term. I wish I could take credit for it. It’s not mine. During Covid, this term came about. ‘We all want to be together alone’. I don’t want to sit necessarily so close to you. I don’t want to engage with you. But when I travel solo – and I travel solo most of the time – I’d much rather come sit in the lobby next to you. I may never say a word to you or engage with you, but there’s warmth in the idea that I’m in a room with a member of my tribe who will protect me and whom I will protect. So it’s somewhat psychological and it’s in our DNA as humans, this idea of wanting to be together.
Obviously we’re generalizing, lots of people wanna be alone, but I make the argument that no one enjoys being alone. They’re alone because they have a fear of some sort that they haven’t gotten over. But you’ve seen that in the WeWork example, you’ve seen that in hotels where we say, our lobbies should be social spaces. People throw those terms around loosely, but what does that really mean? And I talk a lot about designing spaces that encourage and allow this idea of being together alone. I’ll give you an example. We use big couches in the lobby. If you sit on that couch, I’m not sitting next to you on the couch anymore. So you’ve now precluded me from sitting on that couch. So instead, why don’t you make them separate chairs, or at least when you’re designing, say, okay, we’re a business hotel. We largely have business travelers that travel solo, male or female, it doesn’t matter. And they’re not gonna sit on the couch if someone is sitting on the coach. Why is there a couch? Let’s make it two separate chairs. So there’s a lot of ways where you can encourage through design, but ultimately it’s about someone walking up to you, offering you a drink, et cetera, et cetera. And making you feel like you’re in someone’s home.
Yeah, and that’s a little bit of sort of human empathy, isn’t it? Understanding emotional intelligence is coming into play there, which is clearly fundamental.
What you just said, it’s funny, and again, back to schools and hotel degrees. We are not curing cancer. This is not rocket science. So people say, what do you look for when you hire someone at any level? I don’t care at the very top or at the bottom. I say I have two criteria. You have to have common sense, which is very uncommon. Emotional intelligence. Because if you nail the emotional intelligence, everything else is easy. And emotional intelligence is unlike the hotel world of old, because the hotel world of old was, we’ll pick on my friends at the Ritz-Carlton. They used to have a credo card: ‘We are ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen’. And there was one way you could act; there’s one way you could say ‘hello’, there’s one way you could say ‘good night’. But that’s not emotional intelligence. You should read me and understand, look for clues that I might give you. And decide what I want. I may not want you to say a word to me. Don’t even greet me. I am walking up to you at the desk with my credit card and my passport in hand. Clearly, I don’t want to be talked to. Just give me my key. Someone else is walking up to you, fumbling through their luggage, complaining about their flight. If you know how to read them, oh my God, Nirvana, huge success.
I am in fact currently working with a Dean of Hospitality at one of the hospitality schools in the US about creating a hospitality-specific emotional intelligence aptitude test. Because… I can train you on all the things. I mean, again, please, no offense. A monkey can do the technical part of the job. It’s the emotional part of the job that’s so much harder in an industry that’s sort of a revolving door. So if I can, before I hire you, test your aptitude towards, we all have emotional intelligence, different levels, and that one is much harder to train on, right? So some of the tricks we’re using, by the way, and this is a really interesting, we could digress here for hours on this topic. I’ll touch on it briefly. We humans, no matter how trained we are, you could be an MI5 agent for 20 years and you cannot control your micro expressions. So one of the examples goes, I’m selling you something. If I pay enough attention and I’m literally looking in your eyes, the minute your pupils dilate, you’re sold. Whatever I’m selling you, you’ve bought it. The problem is we don’t read those signs, so what do I do? I keep talking and I keep talking and now you’re bored and you moved on and I’ve killed the sale.
So if we can really focus on things that matter again, read the room, read your audience, pay attention to the signals they give you, the cues they give you, the micro expressions they give you, because that’s what we all want. You may want to be greeted as ‘Good evening, Sir’. Doesn’t matter to me. I don’t really care. So that’s really where I think we should be spending most of our time as hoteliers. The problem is we spend it on design and scent and art and branding and all this stuff that is important, but by itself makes no difference.
So these hotels should be up in their budget basically for staff training, staff development, but looking at these softer skills as the primary goal.
100%. And I’ll give you another example. We do mystery shops, all hotels do them. I send you in to shop one of my hotels, you have a list of a hundred questions on it and you go through the list. Did they use your name at check-in? Did they offer you help with your luggage, et cetera, et cetera. And that list is so transactional, I could ace it as an employee and be the most miserable human you met. So we said, that’s really not a good judge of the experience. Let’s change the narrative. Let’s intermix the transactional list with an emotional shop. So now we do an emotional mystery shop. You don’t have a list of questions. The list is, how’d they make you feel when you check in? Did you feel welcome? Did you feel warm and fuzzy? When you had a problem, did they genuinely make you feel that they actually were invested and cared about your problem?
And it’s funny to watch some ace the transactional and miserably fail on the emotional, I don’t want that. And I don’t want it the other way either. I want a balance, right? Because you have to have some rules, right. Like I love the phrase flexibility within a framework. There has to be framework. Because otherwise your brand gets diluted, your offering gets diluted, you’re leaving it at the whim of some employee potentially. But if you balance the two equally, you’re checking the boxes you must check.
By the way, why do you need to use my name three times when I check in? I already know my name. You wanna blow me away when I come back without looking down, then remember my name and say, hey, how was this pub that I sent you to? I hope you liked it. That you see Joe the bartender that’s important using my name while you’re reading off of screen three times and that’s the thing by the way in the hotel industry you must use the guest name three times to check it so I think we’re still stuck in the 80s in a way and I think the world is changing around us and we as an industry tend to late adopters.
I want to just pop back to something you mentioned. You mentioned the word tribe, which just intrigues me because I know that the creation or the finding of a tribe has been a big of the whole lifestyle hotel development, you know, trying to drill down into hotels that suit certain tribes. Is that something that you do with the hotels that you’re involved with? Is it a valid thing? Can those tribes be found?
So if you combine everything I said, this idea of longing for belonging, this idea that we all want to be together. And I’d like to use this word that people don’t like: cult. Cult has negative connotations about it. Yet cult is a part of culture. Apple is a cult. If Apple tomorrow made toilet paper and sold it for 25 pounds a roll, you would buy it because you subscribe to the cult. Now, the quality better be there and there better be a reason for it to be worth that much, but you’re blindly buying it, day one, without even knowing a thing about it. Zero advertising, you will buy it.
A lot of these brands that we love and admire are cults in their own right, and they have cult leaders, like it or not. I mean, every brand we generally love tends to have a human at the front. It’s not some big dark hole corporate thing, even in the hotel world, right? Whether it’s André Balazs with Chiltern Firehouse, whether it’s Ian Schrager, whether it’s Bill Kimpton, Bill Marriott, on and on and on… Hilton, like these were all humans. That made the offering feel human and thus cult leaders, right? So I think if there became a checklist for how to do this, it becomes diluted and not worth it. There’s not a checklist for it. It’s 10,000 things that you do that create that environment that creates sort of this cult following to certain brands.
And some brands are brilliant at it, some brands are not. And you have to have consistency of execution. Like, I don’t want to belong to a cult because it’s cool, but then suffer and not be able to go to sleep or not have my shower work. But a lot of those things have become table stakes so now the question is, how do you create a cult? How do you create a tribe? How to create culture? I go back to this idea of, if you walk into my door and I make you feel loved, welcomed, and safe, it’s not that hard. And think about this, by the way. We humans, obviously, our very first goal, very, very, first goal – no matter what anyone tells you – is to survive. So safety is hugely important to us. And again, I’m talking very scientifically, Darwinian now. So if when you walk into my doors, I make you feel like you belong, you’re home now and you’re safe, literally and figuratively safe. I think your guard is down, your senses are heightened, and all of a sudden the lighting is better and the scent is better and the food is better. And that all comes from the people, not from the things.
So I think If there was ever a list on how to create a tribe or a cult, then it’s dead, it’s over, I don’t want to be in it. I really think it’s practicing what you preach and creating environments that are conducive to this and hoping for the best. There is no 100% guarantee formula for success and some try it and it fails miserably, but I think it is all about the attention to detail and the culmination of the things that you do. Your food, your drink, who you do business with.
And most importantly, by the way, and we forget this, if you work for me and I expect you to do X for the guest. But then I treat you completely opposite, what message am I sending you? I’ll give you an example. That lobby restroom better be spotless. I better be able to eat off the floor. It better be that clean and perfect. You go to the employee restroom and it’s a war zone. Think about the message you’re sending that way. Now, does the employee rest room and bathroom need to have marble and whatever? No, but it better be well-lit, bright, clean, functional. Because you’re sort of expecting people to have pride in what they do, yet you treat them like garbage. So a lot of this comes from that issue too.
The teammate is, in my opinion, more important than the guest. Actually, I’ll give you one of my favorite Marriott quotes: ‘take care of your employees, who will take care of your customers, who will care of you’. That’s it. Like that is the formula. It has not changed in a hundred years, and I don’t think it will change in another 100 years. But now all we care about is let’s go buy more art. Let’s buy more of this, more of that. And it’s become a race to the bottom because we keep trying to outdo each other with things, forgetting the very basic thing that we do, which is this idea that I mentioned about making someone feel like they belong.
And obviously in the race to find these tribes and the race to sort of find these markets, there’s been a proliferation of brands across the hotel sector. We’ve now got big players, the Marriotts, the Accors…
Marriot has 38.
I think Accor has well over 30 now. Do you think there are too many brands in hospitality?
1,000% and with all due love and respect to them, the only reason they do it is I call it AOP circumvention. AOP is area of protection. You show up to Marriott and you say, ‘Hi, I want to build a Westin on the corner of Maine and Maine’. Great. We’ll build you a Westin. No problem. And we will protect your investment. We promise you we will not build another Westin within X radius miles. Great. I come to them and they say, Oh, we’d love to give you a hotel. How about we do a Marriott on the corner of Maine and Maine? And I say… Well, what’s the difference between a Westin and a Marriott? Aren’t they basically the same thing? No, no, no. They’re different and there’s different swim length… they’re the same.
And I am not blaming them for that. It’s what they do. They want, they need, to grow. They need to expand. They need continue to collect fees. So that’s what they do. And what that’s caused is this paradox of choice. I’m in this business. I travel obsessively. I couldn’t tell you the difference between half of those brands. They all become the same at some point because of this idea. Now, most of the innovation you’ve seen has been from small players who’ve built something really unique and then the big brands buy it. And it’s unique and it stands out. Accor’s example, Hoxton. Sharan (Pasricha) did a great job building that brand. And now Accor has this really cool, unique brand. But in due course, it’s gonna get diluted when there’s 50 of them. I mean, that’s the nature of our business, unfortunately.
And funnily enough, when you look at the independent brands, Western Europe and North America, there aren’t many left that have not been bought. Like we’re down to very few. So my message to upcoming hoteliers is, go create a new brand with one goal in mind. How do I create something that the big brands in five to seven years would want and will buy from me for a pile of money? Because we’ve run out of brands to sell them and at some point, all of their brands become ubiquitous. They’re all the same by and large. They want something new and fresh. They’re gonna come look for something new and fresh from the entrepreneurs who can break the rules, who can push the boundaries, who can do things that brands could never do, by virtue of being big machines and publicly traded companies, they can’t push the envelope like we can.
Yeah, yeah. And of course the other side to that expansion is we’re seeing the luxury brands getting more heavily involved in this sector, either in their own names or with LVMH taking on things like Cheval Blanc. That’s been quite a big change. I think actually, you know, sort of a completely different sector that’s basically moving into… parking its tanks on hospitality’s lawn, if you like. What’s your take on that? How much further do you think that’s got to go?
If you think about any brand out there in any business, hospitality is the natural brand extension for them. If you sell furniture, hospitality is the right brand. If you sell fashion, it’s easy. Because it’s easy to do a Prada restaurant and a Louis Vuitton beach club and a Versace hotel and a Bulgari hotel, et cetera, because it is easy to throw the name on it. At some point, it becomes dilutive and ubiquitous, right? Like what is an Armani hotel? In Dubai I’ve been in and stayed. What is an Armani hotel? It’s a nice hotel. Well, what about it is Armani? Nothing. There’s a couple books in the lobby. Bulgari on the other hand you go to the Bulgari hotel, I’ve stayed in Shanghai and in Milan, and there’s like Bulgari everywhere. And it’s part of Marriott, by the way They don’t like to tell you that, but it is part of Marriott. The thing, though, is if it’s not thoughtful and intentional, why?
Like the Cheval Blanc example is great. It’s just a luxury hotel. It has nothing to do with LVMH, technically speaking. It’s not like you go and there’s LVMH brands everywhere. It’s subtle. It’s elegant. But I think for LVMH, it shows that we are a very diverse offering and we are about luxury lifestyle, whatever that means. If you want to buy a pair of underwear, that’s luxury. We got it. If you wanna stay in a luxury hotel, we got it; if you want a suitcase, if you want a watch. Sort of a broad plethora of offerings. I mean, short of offering food, they probably have covered, or healthcare, they’ve covered a big chunk of the gamut that a consumer can engage with them through.
And if you go back to my idea about cult, and this Apple example I gave you, if you belong to the LVMH cult, whatever they do, you’re there. So they have a built-in audience who already loves them, belongs to them, wants them to be in spaces they may not be. So it’s a natural extension. But again, at some point, it’s becoming a paradox of choice. There’s too many, they’re all becoming ubiquitous. So what if I go to Harrods and go to the Prada Cafe? What does that mean? I get a piece of cake that has the Prada stamp on it.
And in the last couple of months, interestingly enough, after this TikTok exposing fashion brands as to how much it costs to do something. And I mean, when you really think about it for a minute, we’ve become so shallow as humans. I am willing to go spend – pick a number – on a bag that has Cuccinelli’s name on it. He should be paying me for advertising this bag, not the other way around, right? But we’ve become so obsessed with brand.
If you were an influencer, he would!
Yeah, yeah. That’s another story altogether. I am an influencer in my own mind. And if anyone knows Cuccinelli, my favorite brand, I’ll happily carry his backpack, happy to do it. But the point is, like everything in life, these sort of cycles, we’ve gone to the extreme of brand everything. And I feel like there’s a little bit of pullback now. There’s a bit of this quiet luxury, less logos. You know, I talk to my kids at uni, let’s go shopping, where do you wanna go? Pick a name, Prada, Versace, and they’re literally, eww, Prada, why would I go to Prada? Where do you want to go? I wanna go thrifting, you know, vintage shopping, actually funny story, I see my…
Pre-loved is what we call it.
Yeah, pre-loved, yeah. I see my son wearing a T-shirt that says on it something like New York City Sewer Department. I’m like, oh cool, is this a collaboration with some big brand, how much did you buy this for? This is really nice, he goes, ‘no’. I said, what is it? He goes, ‘I bought it at Goodwill’, our pre-loved place in the U.S. I said, Goodwill, how much was it? He goes, ‘25 cents’!
So you think about it generationally, the definition of luxury is changing. And I think we’re finally realizing that luxury is about time and freedom, not about brands, right? Again, remember we’re somewhat jaded in the Western hemisphere, particularly in Western Europe and the US. There are lots of people who’ve never seen a whatever and they want to wear that watch and drive that car. But I feel like those of us, and you’ve heard this repeatedly, this idea that we’re pursuing experiences, not things anymore. I mean, I tell people getting married, don’t go spend $50,000 on a wedding. You could go on a cross-the-world trip that’s memorable for life, rather than one night with 100 people who become the purpose of that day, not you. You’re no longer the focus, they’re the focus. Are they having a good time, et cetera, et cetera. So I think we’re changing. And I think if we don’t pay attention generationally to what’s happening, we’re gonna be left behind.
As you say, in terms of their Western markets, that’s a major challenge for the luxury goods brands, the luxury goods and accessories. Do you think that challenge is also going to come up to luxury hospitality, to the very premium brands in hospitality, or are they slightly more insulated against such a generational change?
There’s always a customer for everything, but I’ll give you an actual example. I was talking to someone from Raffles in the US on a panel and he’s talking about butlers. And I said, whoa whoa whoa, stop please for a moment. I polled the audience. Who here has ever seen a post on social media of someone bragging about a butler? Crickets. Who here in the room has seen the photo of a button next to the bed that says ‘Press here for Champagne’? Every hand goes up. That’s new luxury. Does that mean we no longer need butlers? No, to some extent, you know, the 70 year old ultra wealthy person traveling wants it. But that person’s kids, even though they grew up with it, they don’t want it. Their butler is… I stayed at this hotel in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, a check-in guy comes up to me, he says, do you use WhatsApp? Yes. Give me your number, please. Sends me a message. He says, this is your butler. It doesn’t matter who’s on the other end. It’s the idea of immediate gratification. Do I need a person wearing a tuxedo standing outside your room? No. But what I want is I need a water. Boom, two minutes later, there’s a water in my room. So again, keeping up with the times.
Again, I’m focusing on Western Europe and North America because we’ve sort of been there, done that. If you’re an emerging economy, you want a taste of it. And it’s not fair for us to use it, abuse it, have it go out of fashion before you’ve even had a chance to try it. So you can have it if you want it. But for us now, the definition of luxury has changed. Interestingly enough, when I worked on the front lines in hotels. Someone pulls up in a fancy car and a suit, and we’re like, oh, that’s the VIP, the rich guy. Now it’s almost like the other way around. The guy who pulls up in a Prius wearing shorts and T-shirt may have 10x more money than the guy in the suits because he has nothing to prove. So when you start thinking about how it’s changing that way, we have to pay attention to it. We absolutely have to.
Yeah, I think crypto has just kind of tossed everything up into the air…
I mean, not even just crypto, like even with the dot com thing and all the people that have become billionaires, like those guys don’t drive Bentleys and wear a three piece, you know, Brioni suits, they’re showing up in whatever they’re wearing, they wearing a high quality T-shirt that you’ve never heard of, right? Zuckerberg with the black T-shirt and a pair of jeans. It’s not about what it is anymore, because they have no one to impress.
This status signaling. And this is really interesting, we’ll digress on this for a second. So back in the day, I’ll show up to a meeting with you and I’ll hold up my watch, extra flashy so you can see it. I may open up my suit jacket a little wider just so you can see the brand. And now I feel like the minute I meet you or see you, literally within a minute, we’re talking about travel. Where have you been? How many countries have you’ve been to? What hotels have you stayed at? Where were you last on vacation? So travel has become the new status symbol. And you think about the, you know, 8.5 billion people on the planet who are becoming more prosperous, just because the world is becoming selectively more prosperous, unfortunately. But like you think about a China or a Brazil or an India, the upcoming middle class, there are billions of people who’ve never seen the London Bridge, who’ve never seen, the Eiffel Tower, those people, the first thing they want to do when they have money is travel, which is good news for our industry.
And sort of back to your question about what’s happening to luxury. I think travel is a luxury now. And that person in India who’s now middle-class, do I buy a watch or do I go see the Eiffel Tower? I bet you 90% of the time they’re going to opt for, I want to go see that Eiffel Tower. Because now I can tell the world about it on social media. I used to have my watch to show it. Now I can show the entire world. Hey, I’ve been to the Eiffel Tower. I’ve seen it.
Yeah. And I think that’s interesting because I went to a last year, I went to a luxury symposium in central London. And it was interesting. If you looked at the day’s agenda, the amount of travel related content on that day, I mean, dwarfed luxury goods, you know, it was sponsored by a high-end cruise company. There were panels on bespoke travel, which was obviously really, really interesting to everybody because you know there was a great deal of engagement with that. I guess that’s what you’re talking about. Basically the luxury industry is kind of shifting basically.
LVMH getting into the space, you already know what you’re going to get at a Cheval Blanc because they won’t put their name on anything that doesn’t meet their strict quality standards. Lots of companies like that out there. And now that you’re affluent and you’ve done a lot of travel, you want to do different kinds of travel. Whether it’s adventure travel, ultra luxury, you know. Think about every brand now, think about what they have: a yacht and a private plane. Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Aman is getting in the business. Because we want to be different. I don’t want to go to the place everybody goes to, I want to go on the Four Seasons plane and do 10 countries in 10 days on a private, you know, 737.
So I think a lot of that is the opportunity for luxury now to penetrate that space, because if you take me on the, I don’t know, Four Seasons plane and you want to partner with Loro Piana and do the interiors with Loro Piana. Well, what a great collaboration, because it’s not in my face. It’s subtle. I’m going to sit on the plane and be like, oh, my God, this cashmere blanket is amazing. What is this? Oh, it’s Loro Piana. OK, I’m gonna go buy from Loro Piana.
So that’s why I was saying the extension of luxury brands into hospitality is an easy, easy, natural way to go through it, because when you go to a hotel, you’re living your entire life. Every aspect of your life happens in a hotel. Right? You sleep, you eat, you work, you exercise, you get a massage, you take a break, you have a drink. So when you think about different businesses trying to cover the gamut of your life cycle, a hotel is the only place where you can capture that.
It’s your life in a day, basically.
Exactly, because you go to a restaurant, I get you eating. You go to a bar, I get you drinking, you know. You go to a hotel, you do all… including work, by the way, and this idea of, and I’ll use your term, not ours, because it’s better than ours. Bleisure. Oh, we call it we call it ‘bleesure’.
I hate it!
I hate it too. But at least the British sounds more elegant. The American pronunciation sounds like a rash that you need some cream for. But this idea that… I am a hybrid human, that’s what I say, I never do one thing. Like whatever I do, I’m doing something else at the same time, it seems, including by the way, go into the bathroom, like that’s no longer a ‘one thing thing’. You’re doing other things at the same time. So when I travel for fun, I’m working. And when I travel for work, I am having fun. And shame on you if you go on a business trip for the first time ever to London and not find 10 minutes to smell the roses as it were. Because some people say, oh, I never left my hotel. Well, you know what, you’re an idiot. You should have left your hotel. Sleep when you’re dead. You have plenty of time to sleep when you are dead. Don’t waste your first and only trip to London sleeping for 10 hours. How dare you?
So again, we’re hybrid humans. So back to this idea of any brand that’s in that space. If you are a brand right now, and you’re trying to find ways to get more eyeballs on you, call hotels, absolutely call hotels. And don’t just call Marriott because they have 8,000 hotels. Sure, they’re the biggest and it’d be easy, but by virtue of them being that big, it’s hard to penetrate, right? It’s a complicated, big company. Hilton, Marriott, et cetera, like go find some smaller hotels that are doing interesting things and let that be your test case.
Cuccinelli, if you want to partner with hotels, call me! So if you want to do something, do it on a small scale because then the big brands will pay attention. But think about anything, you literally, you could be a pen maker. What better way to test your pen than to try it in a hotel where every day a 100 room hotel is seeing 70, 75 new people every single day. And you could tell the quality of the people by the quality of the hotel and the price. So if your pen is worth a dollar, okay fine, put it in the lower end hotel. Exactly, so easy lift. You get a lot of eyeballs on it right away. You have a real life test case scenario, right? In real life, rather than trying to go open a retail store and pay the rent and go through all that trouble. And what are you really learning and seeing at the end of the day?
And in a hotel, like think about a furniture manufacturer. I’m living with this piece. If you want to buy a couch, you go to the furniture store, you sit on the couch for a minute, for an hour. How well do you really know it? Put that couch in a room and now you’re like, you’re lying down naked on it, you’re jumping on it, you’re doing whatever you want to do. You get to really experience it. Like what a great way to combine a showroom into a place where I’m actually engaging.
Yeah, perfect, perfect. Now on the subject of hotel stays, and you’ve mentioned that you’re staying in hotels around the world, but you’ve got a very interesting approach to staying in hotels. Tell our audience a little bit about it, and also more importantly, why you do it.
We’ll talk about my neurotic, rather than interesting, approach. So I don’t know when it began, probably, I don’t know, 15 plus years ago. I have FOMO, major, major fear of missing out. And I always say, well, I can’t just be here because there’s there and I wanna try everything. I wanna see everything. So I decided that whenever I travel now, I have a one night stand relationship with hotels. If I’m in London three nights, I move three times, never the same hotel twice. So I pack and unpack every time. In a city like London, by the way, it’s not like it’s easy to move. I’m just walking from one block to the other. Really not. And I do this across the globe and I’ve kept track in Manhattan, in New York. That’s the only place is I go there a lot and it’s a big city. So I’ve decided to keep track. I’ve stayed in 251 different hotels in Manhattan.
I didn’t even know there were 251 hotels in Manhattan!
There’s a lot more than that. And I will stay at the Aman, you know, at the very top, and I will stay at a hostel and share a room with sketchy people doing sketchy thing in the middle of the night, because it’s become to me no longer about… look, I’m not going to lie. It’s a little bit of street cred, social currency bragging, right? I mean, imagine I walk in a room and I’ll say, I know hotels. Try me, pick a hotel. The first hotel that comes to mind, there’s a very high likelihood I’ve stayed. Ice Hotel in Northern Sweden, sure, I’ve stayed in it. The Feralda Hotel in Amsterdam, three rooms inside a crane, yes, I stayed in that too. Burj Al Arab, blah, blah blah blah. So 251 in Manhattan, across the spectrum.
Initially it was education, I wanted to learn. And I’ve always said, the only thing I know is I know nothing. And I’ve always said, the only thing I know is that I know nothing. It’s I think Aristotle or one of those smarter than I people’s quotes. But people think they know everything about their craft, and we don’t. It changes every day. So I said the only way to learn, again no offense to universities, is the hard knock school of life. On the road, pay the dues, check-in, check-out, don’t sleep well, the toilet doesn’t work, the elevator’s loud. And it’s interesting; I tour a lot of hotels, but touring a hotel is different than staying in a hotel, even if you tour thoroughly and exhaustively, because back to this idea, we are most vulnerable in our sleep. So our senses are heightened. So all of a sudden now I do hear the loud elevator, and I do hear the banging pipes and the noisy neighbors, etc. It’s just a different, intimate experience.
So I decided that the only way for me to learn and remain current is to do this thing and then it became my thing and people would call me out if I don’t move hotels. I’m so sorry that I’m staying at the Aman for a second night, forgive me!
Anyway, but it’s become such an amazing learning experience and two interesting facts that come out of this is I literally learn more from the smaller scrappy hotels than I do from the fancy. It doesn’t matter how much it is or what it is or how many stars it is. None of that matters. So people say, well, what do you remember? And I have 251 hotels in Manhattan. I stayed at the Baccarat Hotel. Ask me what kind of flooring material is in the bathroom. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. All I can tell you is I’m sure it was lovely and nice. I’m sure the art was lovely, a nice crystal whatever. But I don’t take any of that home with me.
So my generic answer to what do I remember is I say, I only remember when someone goes out of their way and genuinely gives a shit. The bar is that low. Somebody who actually remembers my name, somebody who actually knows what I asked him earlier in the morning and has it for me in the room without me asking him for it, et cetera, et cetera et cetera.
So it really is all about; and again, I’m gonna go scientific and philosophical on you, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Maslow is the scientist who says, we humans, at the very bottom of this pyramid, we have basic physiological needs. Shelter, water, air, food, check, check check check, and you go up to the very top of the pyramid and you get to transcendence, self-actualization and transcendence. If you think about the business we’re in, hotels, we’re in the shelter business. We are at the bottom of the pyramid. One of the very basic human needs is shelter, and yes, we provide that. But if that’s the only business we are in, we’re at the bottom. I wanna be in the transcendence business. And to me, transcendence is making you feel like you’ve arrived, you belong, you found your tribe, and you are the only thing that matters.
When you’re standing in front of me in a hotel, engaging with me in any capacity whatsoever, I wanna fake it enough and pretend to make you believe. I’m not saying you have to love everyone and make, you know, truly believe it. You don’t have to, but convince me that I am the singular most important thing in your day at this very moment. Instead, what do we do? We’re answering the phone, we’re talking to someone else. You’re like a bot. You are literally an interruption in our day. If we manage to do that, that’s transcendence and that’s what builds loyalty. Not the art, not the bed, none of that stuff.
By the way, London, where we’re sitting today, in my opinion is maybe – globally even – has become the quintessential luxury hotel place. Obviously you have so much new arrivals here and I think the hotel scene here is second to none. It’s been amazing. I was here a couple of months ago, stayed in four hotels and toured 21 in four days and I’ve done the Cotswolds and all that like it is truly amazing what’s happening in London. I’m blown away.
Yeah, I mean, I think London’s now getting on towards a hundred five star hotels. I know it’s up in the high eighties now and growing.
Yeah, the Financial Times did a piece that there’s a glut of it potentially, but London is such a global hub that I think in due course it will get absorbed. Yeah, maybe a blip where maybe it’s oversupplied for a minute, but I’m not worried about it long term.
And do you think, I mean, I’ve seen some pretty rich pricing in some of the hotels in London. Do you think that’s plausible to continue?
I mean, honestly, between New York, all these primary big cities, London, the prices are absolutely ridiculous. And there’s been a couple of issues. One they are high barrier to entry markets, you can’t just show up and say, I want to build a hotel. It’ll take you years as you know, let alone the cost. You have all these headwinds for hoteliers: cost of construction, cost of acquisition, cost of operation, let alone all the stuff we’re dealing with now on both sides of the pond, the tariffs and all that business. Everything we do has become so much more expensive. And the guest expectations are higher and higher. So it’s kind of like this formula where you as a guest want more, everything costs me more. And for me to give you what you want at today’s cost to be solvent, I have to charge you those prices.
Like New York for a very long time, you made no money being in New York as a hotelier because the cost of doing business was so expensive. They’re finally getting the pricing power by virtue of… the reason New York is expensive today, for those who don’t know, is a couple of things. One is a lot of hotels were taken for use to shelter refugees. Then Airbnb, there was a regulation that stopped Airbnb. So all of a sudden, the compression in New York became massive and thus the prices went up because there was supply and demand.
Honestly, London, I think the luxury is just so beautifully done and so expensive, mathematically given the cost of construction and the cost of financing, more importantly. Good for them getting those prices, but anyone paying those prices of the luxury don’t think that they are sitting, counting their pounds and laughing at you. They’re making obviously a decent return, but it’s not as crazy as you might think it is.
Interesting. And just thinking back to your widely traveled, many-stayed journey through hotels, and that’s a lot of hotels you can call upon, do you ever still have a kind of light bulb moment and look at something and think, ‘God, I’ve not seen it done like that before’. That really is kind of, not necessarily just in terms of that amazing service, but just in something that they’ve done in a hotel, you think, yeah, I like that.
Lots and lots of examples, lots of pleasant surprises. Often It was where you’re just yeah, basically. Wow. This is really neat. I haven’t thought about it, good for them amazing And by the way, sometimes it’s the simplest thing. I’ll give you two examples; one is I’m at this hotel in North Carolina the Umstead Hotel and Spa. When you leave the room and they clean your room, you know, you leave your cords behind. Not only do they wrap your cords beautifully, they put a very beautiful leather strap around your cords with a clasp on it that has a logo on it that you’re gonna keep. It’s beautiful and well done. Like what an elegant… I know lots of hotels wrap them, but this hotel goes an extra step and actually puts leather clasp on it, sustainable, you’re not throwing away plastic, et cetera.
So that was one example. The other example is the Equinox Hotel in New York. Equinox is a fitness brand. They did their first hotel in New York City, health centric. And the really interesting thing about us hoteliers, we have one job, we really have one job at the end of the day, giving you a good night’s sleep. Yet, we have failed miserably at it. I go to every hotel, I lie in the bed, the light is blinking and the smoke detector in my face.
Yeah, that’s a bugbear of mine, as well.
I travel with sticky dots, just to make the point, and I put the sticky dots on them. I’m very neurotic on travel, I have so many things I can tell you about, one of which is water pressure and taking the shower heads off and all of that. So you lie in bed, the thermostat is blinking in your face. The TV has a light blinking on it. They have a smoke detector, the thermostat, the blackout on the window isn’t blackout enough. Light seeps in. It’s noisy. All those things. And you’re like, that’s the one thing you had to get right. Everything else pales in comparison. So the Equinox Hotel in New York City in Hudson Yards, there’s a button next to the bed that says perfect sleep, good night’s sleep, whatever. You press the button, all the shades go down. Like a coffin. I mean, it is black. 100% blackout. The temperature drops down to 67 automatically, Fahrenheit. The scientifically proven ideal sleeping temperature. The bed is spectacular. Another one of those light bulb moments, the king bed has two king size comforters on it. So if you’re there with your spouse or your partner, typically what happens is you’re fighting for it. One wants it on, one wants it off. They give you two completely independent ones. Do what you want. You can have it, right? You get up in the middle of the night, us old guys, to go to the bathroom, there’s a very subtle, faint motion sensor light that comes on under the bed frame, so it’s not in your eyes, right? So that way you don’t have to fumble and press buttons and do all of that.
So you think about all those really, really simple touches. This is not a cost issue. Buying a smoke detector that doesn’t have a light, or by the way, United States hoteliers, if it’s a regulation, put it on the side. Like there’s way to make it work that you put it on the side. This tells me, and these are two words I love, with everything I do, thoughtful and intentional. Be thoughtful in the things that you do. Of course you need a smoke detector. I want a smoke detector, I want to feel safe, but be thoughtful and think about unintended consequences. And when I talk about intentional, don’t throw a piece of art on the wall just because. Like make sure there’s intention behind it.
We’ve overused the term ‘storytelling’. Like I don’t need to know what the name of the person who cast my ceramic toilet is, it doesn’t matter. But there are elements that are worth telling about. And I think we’ve just overused the term, but there’s beauty to this… back to the pen idea and brands getting into this space. Like with the amenities, there’s a company that takes old soap from hotels, soap bars, and they recycle them and they help women that are abused or whatever, and they remake them, et cetera. Like, that’s an interesting story to tell. Focus on that story. Not everything needs to tell a story. But generally speaking, those are simple examples. And you heard me say. Nothing that blew me away – and by the way, I’m talking about things not humans. It’s always about humans, but you asked about things, so these are examples with things.
And so in terms of your own hotel management company, Practice Hospitality, tell me a little bit about that and how you bring a lot of all this thinking that you’ve just been explaining to me, how you make that happen within your own business.
Sure, I want to be crystal clear. What I preach is nirvana. I’m not telling you that what I’m telling you is everything I do. It’s everything I and my team strive to do, right? Like that’s the important piece. When you’re in the third party management business, often you’re subject to the owner’s desires, wishes, and whims; and our job as, I don’t think of us as a service provider, I think of as a partner. If I am your partner and you’re about to do something stupid, I’m gonna tell you this makes no sense and here’s why, and I will fight you for it. But at the end of the day, if you’re the person writing the check, my job is to tell you, but then you make the decision. So that’s a clear distinction.
But I honestly think everything I’m telling you at the of the end day comes from ‘inspect what you expect’. We often don’t. Like when I say I travel around, like I do it in my own hotels, I book my own reservations on the web engine, I give them my credit card number, I do the thing. Because I wanna go through every step you guests go through, and I wanna see the pain you might go through. Like I use this example all the time. I never will book on the OTAs because I’m a hotel guy. I’m not going to cost the hotel 20, 30%. No, of course. So I’ll go directly to their website. And by step number 74, I’m on the postal code field. And they’re making me change my keyboard from alpha to numeric. And I’m saying, you know what, I love you. I’m sorry. You can’t help people who can’t help themselves, I am leaving you. And I get out of that site. And I go book on Expedia in three clicks.
So I want to see if we do that too, right? And are we paying attention to this? What does the email that says, here’s your confirmation look like? What are we telling you? Et cetera, et cetera. So, but how you try to do what I’m saying in your own place is you have to practice what you preach. You personally have to practice what you preach. And back to the Marriott quote, take care of your people, they’ll take care of your customers and they’ll take of you. So it really is, we are 100, 10 billion, billion percent all about people, our own people first, our guests second, and our stakeholders and owners third. And it’s sort of in that order, because that’s what’s gonna make it happen and happen well. But yeah, the only thing I can tell you is lead by example, like the cult leader, lead by example, you can’t be hypocritical, you can’t not practice what you preach, you have to do it, and it’s not easy.
Yeah. And it’s interesting what you were saying about the booking process sometimes being the stumbling block before you’ve even got up to the start line. But there’s also the whole customer journey. I was chatting to a guy, I know, you know well, Stan Helou. And he was saying about particularly at the luxury end of the spectrum, where you know where you expect a little bit more, is that even that customer journey from making the booking to coming and staying in a hotel very often he’ll feel just abandoned. There’d be no contact, no courtesy phone call. Hey, Mr. Helou, what can we do for you? You know, which ahead of your stay, I mean, do you see that as well? Do you think that journey’s a bit crap?
It is completely crap. It is such a missed opportunity. And again, it’s a function of knowing your audience. And here’s the fundamental issue, by the way. We mistakenly think we’re in the service business. We’re in the hospitality business. Wrong. We are in the retail business. We have perishable inventory. If I was selling watches, if I don’t sell the watch today, the watch is there tomorrow. I could sell it tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after. Room number 101 in my hotel tonight. That room for sale on the 25th of April is where we are today, 24th of April. That room will never be sold again. It’s only a one time thing. So we have perishable inventory and yet we think of ourselves as anything else but retailers.
We are retailers and by being retailers, think about Instagram. I’m on Instagram. I see a pair of shoes I like. I press two buttons and they’re in the post coming my way. Again, I go to the hotel website and they are fighting me at every step from buying from them. So you are foolish as a hotelier if you’re not yourself doing this process beginning to end, check in, get the emails, get the text, get the survey at the end. You will find so many gaps. It is stunning to me how many things are left unattended to. You’re, not building loyalty. You’re not easing the process. So 100% you’ve got to pay attention to it, and it’s broken.
And luxury, when you talk about luxury, I mean, white glove. I mean that’s the whole point of luxury. The answer should always be ‘yes’. We’ve always heard that the answer is always yes for a fee. We’re not doing things for free, but how are you accomplishing this? Maybe you want to be called on the phone. Maybe I want to be texted or WhatsApped or DMed or Instagrammed or whatever method I use. Like make sure you know your customer and engage with them, and ask them from the very beginning: light touch, heavy touch. What do you want? We’re happy to call you every day to be your therapist if you want, what do you need from us?
In fairness to hoteliers, it’s hard. Staffing, cost of staffing, reliability of staffing in a post-Covid world; but technology has enabled us to do a lot of that now. And on the technology subject, I know we didn’t touch on it. I am a huge advocate of technology, AI included, and robotics. I’m knee deep in it. I’m talking about it every day and using it every day. I want technology to allow us hoteliers to remove the friction from the interaction to allow me then to engage with you in the art of human connections. Learning you, reading you, reading your body language, not shuffling papers around and ‘sign here’ and ‘initial there’ and ‘insert here’ and ‘remove there’.
I mean, think about how cumbersome the process is versus retail, like I mentioned online. Think about skis and they’ll show up on your Amazon page. Why haven’t we looked at retail as our inspiration? And funnily enough, by the way, like people say, where do you look for inspiration? I don’t look at hotels anymore. I literally look at retail. And retail to me was at the verge of death. Necessity is the mother of all inventions. So they reinvented their whole process. Like they figured out how to make it work well. Even stores, by the way, we talk about hospitality and other brands getting into hospitality. When you walk into a Nike store today, they know you’re not buying a pair of shoes because you’re gonna look, you’re going to buy it online, you don’t want to carry it, free shipping, no tax, whatever. But they want you to feel a certain way to build loyalty to the brand.
So they’re focusing more on ‘what is our retail experience look like’? Not how many pairs. I mean, think about Hermès, you walk in, there’s nothing on the shelf anyway, right? But this idea of building loyalty through these experiences, through the people there, how they treat you, what they offer you, and some of these activations they do in stores now are pretty amazing.
But I think as you mentioned about hospitality now learning some of those tricks from retail. But I do think also that over the last decade or so, retail, at the luxury end especially, learned a lot from hospitality. And now you see the AP House, lovely kind of almost like private members club as part of a… it’s not even a store anymore, as you say, it is just about kind of experiencing the brand and oh yeah, there’s a couple of watches over there in the corner.
I mean, look, interestingly enough, I have a friend who runs AP for the West Coast in the US and the AP House is spectacular. His job is allocations to decide who gets watches. They’re sold out every day, like you’re lucky to get a watch, so they’re not selling you anything. So why spend the money on the house? Why do all of that? Because they’re trying to build loyalty. They want you to be a customer for life, turn your kids into customers for life. Tell everyone you know about it. And that’s this idea of hospitality. They’re not doing the house to sell you watches. The watches sell themselves, right? They literally sell themselves. Ultimately, it’s about building loyalty long term. They’re not… AP is not thinking about it, you know for the next three years They’re thinking about for the 30 years
Yeah, future-proofing, their customer base.
I love that term, by the way, and we use it in my business every day. How do we future proof our investments, our thinking, our teammates, our ways? Because we seem to always be stuck in the today. Lots of hotels… I’ll give you this quick analogy. Back in the 90s, there were these hotel gods, mostly men, sadly, Swiss educated, multilingual, twenty thousand dollar Brioni suits, had the secretary and the country club and all those things. And they were gods.
I now describe those guys as the double-breasted Chinese suit guys. Those are the same guys, specifically, who said, oh, that internet thing is a fad, it’ll go away. Those same guys that were gods once upon a time are now calling me looking for work. And I’m heartbroken and sad going, what happened to you? And what happened them is, A), they thought they knew everything. B), they ignored what’s happening in the world around them, technology.
So I used that analogy today to specifically talk about AI and social media. And I’ll give you another example about social media in a minute. If you’re not paying attention, you’re not future-proofing yourself as a professional, nor anything you touch or do. And again, you remember, I mean, maybe you’re a little younger than me perhaps, the internet thing at the time, people like, yeah, this internet thing, website, what am I gonna do with the website? Who cares about that, we have phones, why would people not call? So it seemed like a foreign language back then. The opposite now seems like the foreign language.
AI is gonna do the same thing. And I hate trends because trends have a shelf life. I don’t focus on trends. I focus exclusively on human behavior and human behavior takes decades, millennia to change. And if you focus on human behavior, you see how people are interacting with your spaces, how they’re booking, how they are packing or unpacking. Are they using the things or are they not? The big debate was desks, by the way, for example. So pre-pandemic, we don’t need desks in the room anymore. Forget desks. Don’t need them, don’t want them. But all of a sudden we now have digital nomads. We have John who’s… it’s three o’clock in the morning in Barcelona, he has to be on a Zoom call with someone in the US. He wants a desk, he doesn’t want to go to the lobby. So again, we were following trends, not human behavior. And if we had paid attention to human behavior, we would have noticed.
But I’ll give you this other example of a technology. So I travel with my kids on these neurotic, across the globe flights, and I take kids every spring break. So I take my daughter on this trip to seven countries in ten days and, for the first time ever, I said you’re in charge of picking the hotels. And for a hotel neurotic hotel guy that took a lot of courage! I said you’re in charge, here are the parameters, cost etc. You’re in charge; and every hotel she found in seven different countries, every hotel she found I loved, and I would not have found on my own. She found and booked them on TikTok. On TikTok! And as you know we think we make the decisions, but if you have children they make the decisions, we just think we made the decisions.
So I go to colleagues, you know, small hotel guys, and I say you need to be on TikTok – I don’t care if you don’t like it, trust me, you must be on and they’re like oh TikTok it’s a fad, it’s going to go away… people, it is not going away, it is here to stay; it is how our children, the next generation of travelers, that’s how they find things. They’re not going to Google to say, ‘show me cool hotels in Laos’. She’s doing it on TikTok. Even Instagram is sort of five minutes ago now, right? Like they are doing it. And that’s the example I use. And even luxury, like was, oh, we’re luxury. We don’t need to touch it. Absolutely you need to, because the 75 year old white dude who loves Raffles and butlers, his kids are the next travelers and they influence a lot of the decision-making.
I mean, think about the White Lotus effect. I wrote a piece on LinkedIn about White Lotus. Again, a fancy hotelier would say, I don’t care about that. People are traveling for that reason. By the way, don’t go buy advertising; go sponsor a show. Because look at the effect that show has had on that destination. So this idea of, I always tell people I would love to be in the New York Times for my ego. So when I meet you at a cocktail party, I can brag to you that I was in New York Times. But at the end of the day, being visible on TikTok, going viral on TikTok, as an ROI, exponentially more valuable than being in the New York Times. No offense to the New York Times. But sometimes again, we middle-aged guys who run this industry sadly are stuck in our own way. And unless you literally think like I know nothing and I’m learning always, you’re gonna be left behind.
Yeah, you got to think like an 18 year old, basically.
14 year old in my case, thank you!
So my son’s 18, maybe he’s gone past the TikTok phase, I don’t know.
No, no, no… no-one is past the TikTok phase! I mean, look, it’ll be something else. My point is, right? It was Facebook for five minutes, or it was MySpace, then Facebook, then Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. Like, there’ll always be a medium, but the idea is, be open-minded. Don’t think you know everything because you don’t. And by the way, whatever you do shouldn’t be for you. Like I say, the hotels I do, if I’m not the audience, it doesn’t matter if I like it. In fact, it’s better that I don’t like it, because if I am not the intended audience and I like it, then I’m deluded enough that I think an 18 year old will like it and I will like it, I’ve diluted it. Like who’s your audience? Build for them, not for you.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that we talked a little about all the proliferation of brands; but I think if there’s one sort of positive of that is at least there is something which is likely to be your taste because there are all these different kinds of concepts, different lifestyle concepts. At least they are now trying to drill down into something where you might find the one that’s absolutely spot on for my particular personality. I guess the more choice, the better in that respect.
Authenticity is, again, one of the most overused words ever. And I describe authenticity as an unapologetic point of view. If you want to do a nautical hotel, go do a nautical hotel and don’t give a damn about what anyone thinks. Because if that limits your population to a certain number of people, they’re going to love it. But if you keep diluting and diluting to try to be everything to everyone, then you’re nothing. You have nothing to stand for.
Like, don’t try to please everyone as an individual because then you have no personality. Decide who you are, embrace it, celebrate it. You’ll have less friends, but more powerful friends, more deeper relationships. And I think as hotels, to your point, when you have that many brands, like what do they all stand for? Unless they stand for something. I’ll give Marriott some credit again. I picked on them on some things. I’ll give them some credit. EDITION, the brand by Marriott started by Ian Schrager with them. Like it has a point of view. And if you say to me across the portfolio of Marriott, there’s nothing like it. It is its own personality. It stands on its own. W for a minute had the ability. W kind of got lost in the shuffle and they’re now trying to reinvent it again to give it a unique personality.
Because if you come to me, I’m a hotel guy, and you say, what is a Westin? I really can’t answer. You ask me what an EDITION is, I can answer that question. Yeah. If I can’t answer, imagine the average consumer who’s looking at thousands of hotels and getting bombarded. How do they pick, how do you build loyalty if you don’t have a point of view? Because if you don’t have a point of you, you’re a commodity; and if you’re a commodity, you’re dead.
I’ll give you an example. If I need petrol in my car, I don’t care what the logo is and what the tagline is and what the dancing cars are doing on the screen. None of it is consequential. I have two considerations only when I want petrol: location, and price. That’s it. And if that’s what we become as hotels, a commodity, and people are buying us on location or price, we’re dead. We’re a bed and a shower.
Because that’s a race to the bottom.
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. If we remove that aspirational thing about hotels, we’re dead. And to be aspirational, you need to resonate with me. Give me something unique to me. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Because what’s unique and aspirational to me may be poverty to you. And it’s not a price thing either, right? It’s aspiration to me isn’t quality. It’s really, I could find something, a hole in the wall in an alley somewhere aspirational. It’s not about cost. It really is about the emotional connection that it creates with me.
It comes all the way back to that customer experience, just that connection that builds loyalty basically. You know, at a kind of visceral level.
100%. You know what I say? I say, if you want to impress me, I want to walk into your lobby blindfolded with earplugs on, with my nose held, and I want to feel your hospitality. I don’t want to see it or hear it or smell it. I want it feel it. And that’s where we fail, because we focus on all the other senses and ignore the singular most important. And the only way that happens is when the person behind the desk comes around, runs to the front door and ushers me in, pretending enough to make me believe that I’m the only thing that matters in their life.
I’ll give you a really good story on this. Where I live… I live in Portland, Oregon on the West Coast of the United States. We have a tire store, where you get your tires replaced or fixed, called Les Schwab. And their thing is, this is their thing, as your car is pulling up to the shop, before you even stop, someone must run, not walk, but run from the store to welcome you and usher you in. And that alone, think about the signal that gives. You’re getting your tire changed. Who cares? More market share, they’re more expensive than your average, but now you’re not going anywhere else. Like, think about it. So that simple act, that simple act, that’s all it takes to do. We’re all suckers. We all want to be VIPs in our own minds. You just have to convince me that I am a VIP and I’m yours for life. I tell my wife this all the time and she doesn’t listen.
Now, Bashar, I want to give you some time to enjoy your very brief stay in London. So I’ve just got a couple more questions, which are sort of straight to you really. And the first one is, is there one… and we’ve talked a lot about the future of the hotel and technology and this, that, and the other; but is there one, however unrealistic I will say, you can dream now. Is there one innovation in hotels that is the number one thing that you’d love to see that you don’t find at the moment?
It’s a really funny question! And I am hungry and thirsty and desperate for innovation; and I can’t see it. I like my room morgue temperature, 64 degrees Fahrenheit year round. You would think once ever in all these stays, including by the way being top status on many of the brands and having stayed in hundreds of their hotels, once ever someone remotely from their desk, you don’t even have to go to the room, would drop the temperature down in the room and send me a note and take credit for it and says, Mr. Wali, we know you’re crazy and want it 64 degrees, even though it’s winter, it’s on 64 degrees. Enjoy! Because if you do that, you will blow me away.
Now we talk a lot about the hotel of tomorrow and when I walk in the room, my phone should tell it I’m here and the art should change to what I like. That’s all nonsense. I’m all for it, I believe in it. It’s interesting, it is the future. But sometimes very, very, very, basic things we miss. I wish someone would do that. And if anyone is listening, you don’t get credit if you do it anymore now, because I told you.
I reckon you’d still be happy with that!
I would, but think about this, someone as neurotically traveled as I am, if that’s what’s going to blow me away, you can tell the bar is really, really, really low. Now, I’ve done a TEDx talk where I talk about some examples where that has happened. There are moments where people blow me way by, again, pushing that transcendence button, as it were, that self-actualization button. But the bar is so low, we fail it every time because we focus on the wrong things.
Final question, what does the future look like for Bashar Wali? What else do you feel you’ve still got to achieve in the hotel business?
Well, for the hotel business, different questions. For myself, there’s 193 countries and two territories and not enough time. So I’m trying to get as many of them as I can. I’m at 70 right now. For the hotel business, what’s next? I think what’s next for the hotel business is I think we’ve gone to the extreme of over designed and over branded and over stimulated and over and over. And I think we’re finally coming back to this idea of wellness, which is a trend in a way, but it won’t go away. But people don’t understand wellness. Wellness is multifaceted. There’s sleep wellness and sexual wellness and financial wellness, and it’s not just exercise and yoga and breathe and all of that and longevity and all that. And I think sometimes wellness is being able to sit alone and just ponder for a moment in a beautiful space.
And we are, as hoteliers, finally starting to understand what wellness is and what it means, and we’re focusing more on it. And we’re focusing on it in, again, these non-hyped, non-trendy kind of ways. It’s not just about having, I don’t know, an ice bath, who cares? There’s so much more to it than that. And by the way, most importantly, I actually just wrote another piece on LinkedIn about this idea of employee wellness. Like, what about those poor people that are barely making it, that see the worst of humanity? Because, you know, humans lose their minds in hotel rooms. I’m like, why? Like, why are, and by the away, I have horror stories I could share with you. We’ll save it for another day. But I think really understanding that wellness collectively, our own wellness, our employees wellness, our guests wellness is really important.
And how do we contribute towards that? How do we give you the opportunity? Again, back to that bleisure thing that I said, if I know you’re there on business for one day, maybe I should pull you aside and say, hey, Mr. Smith, by the way, I know, you’re here for one day, but this is really, really amazing neighborhood in London. Nobody knows about it. It’s quiet. There’s this fantastic Pho Vietnamese soup shop. I think you’d like it; you should try it. Like that’s really showing that I’m invested in you and your wellness.
Focus on the sleep experience. Focus, focus, focus. So I think wellness is here to stay. The longevity thing is, you know, we humans have been pursuing the fountain of youth for life and we won’t stop. That’s a specialty thing. I just think, I hope, the future of hotels is back off a little bit. Let’s see the forest through the trees. Let’s not focus on the wrong things. And let’s focus on the holistic thing for our guests, the holistic experience beginning to end. And ensure that their stay with us provides them some wellness during their stay, even for an hour, even for a day, but really show them that we’re invested in their wellbeing.
Bashar Wali, that has been tremendous fun. Thank you so much indeed for all your time and your insights.
Thank you for having me.
