As part of its commitment to upgrade the image of the dining options at its properties, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Toronto, has debuted Taste, a new epicurean website that aims to highlight F&B initiatives from around the world.
The website is organized around three main channels: ingredients, experiences and restaurants. It encourages both current Four Seasons consumers as well as potential new guests to interact with the brand via features such as “One ingredient, three chefs,” which showcases unique recipes with a featured item, as well as first-person accounts such as those highlighted in the “Chef Moments” section.
HOTELS talked with Guy Rigby, vice president of food and beverage, Americas, for Four Seasons, about how the site got started and its main business goals.
HOTELS: How did the idea for Taste originate? Why launch this now?
Guy Rigby: In the last few years we’ve really been trying to change the image people have of hotel dining. We’ve invested a lot of money in our restaurants and bars to make them a lot more relevant and a lot more like independent, freestanding restaurants rather than hotel dining rooms, and we’ve done that on multiple different levels — from a design point of view, from a food point of view, to service to grooming to menu development to mixology to wine programs. In every aspect we’ve really been working hard to evolve food and beverage so that it’s a lot more fun rather than formal. We really felt there was an opportunity to share the enthusiasm and the passion of the people we have in the field with a broader audience. One of the things we thought would be good to do was to have this website.
One of the ideas is that of one ingredient, three chefs. I thought it was brilliant because it gave the whole site a hook. If I knew that on a regular basis I could go to a site like Taste and get some really cool ideas about ingredients, about recipes, about mixology, I think it would be a fun thing, particularly as people like to be associated with interesting brands like Four Seasons. So that’s really how it came about.
HOTELS: Who is the target audience for Taste?
Rigby: It’s a fairly broad audience. Anybody who is a current user of Four Seasons will be excited to see what exactly we’re doing with our restaurants and bars. Current Four Seasons users will get a huge kick out of going to this site and recognizing places they have been, maybe recognizing recipes of dishes they have had.
Really, as much as anything, we’re looking to reach a new audience, people who are not familiar with Four Seasons. Regardless of how much things are changing, people still have this perception that hotel dining is not really for them. So we’re really trying to find a new audience that will look at this and say Four Seasons is a place that has a great and vibrant restaurant and bar company within its organization doing really great and fun things with food and beverage.
HOTELS: When you say new users, is there a particular demographic you’re targeting?
Rigby: Definitely we’re looking at a younger demographic. The typical Four Seasons user is getting to be in the 30-50 age bracket, but we’re definitely targeting, say, Millenials. Really, the fact is, as we all grow older, we try to adopt younger habits, and we want to eat in restaurants that are a little more vibrant and fun that keep us young. We want to stay in tune with current trends in food and wine and mixology, and I think that’s what we’re going to try and do — target not necessarily only younger people, but people who are existing Four Seasons users who are in their 40s, 50s or even 60s and will enjoy reading this site and seeing what is current and relevant in our restaurants.
HOTELS: What are the highlights of the site from your perspective?
Rigby: We’re going to do a feature called chef moments. We will highlight maybe the chef in Chiang Mai — we have a cooking school there. We might do a feature on that chef, maybe his favorite holiday in Thai culture. He might have a particular story about what he cooks at that time of year.
It could be Chef Brooke Vosika in Boston, for example, who makes his own cider at home. He has an organic garden and is very passionate about ingredients.
The Chef Moments section will really give you a sort of fun, personal look at a lot of our personalities within food and beverage at Four Seasons.
We’re going to have a news section, so if there are new restaurants opening, that will be a great opportunity for us to share information to a very broad audience about new restaurants that are coming online. If we’re doing an exciting promotion — we just did one in the Americas called Drink Pink in October where every one of our bars in the Americas did a pink drink and a portion of the proceeds went to a breast cancer-related charity. There might be an interesting food-related holiday going on in Saudi Arabia; we’re a global hotel company, so we’ll be able to share information about so many very interesting stories about food from all over the world.
HOTELS: So are you looking to each of your hotels to contribute content for the site?
Rigby: The content is going to be very global. We are definitely looking for hotels around the world to contribute content. We’ve had calls with our PR directors from every Four Seasons hotel around the world. People were very passionate about it.
HOTELS: How is Four Seasons publicizing Taste? Will the URL be linked from other Four Seasons websites?
Rigby: We’re going to launch it as a standalone website. You will be able to access it from the main Four Seasons website. Each hotel will be able to include a link. Most of our restaurants have a Facebook site and thousands of Twitter followers, so there are multiple ways in which we’ll be able to spread the word on the Taste website.
Hopefully down the road we can create a separate app for it, but that’s hopefully something we’ll try to do next year.
HOTELS: What are the main business goals for Taste as well as the expected ROI for the site?
Rigby: The purpose of this site for me is how we continue to let everybody know that we’re moving in a very different direction with our restaurants and bars. That’s really the goal. Obviously if you go to the website and you see information about one of our restaurants, one of our hotels, you are engaged and it encourages you, perhaps, to think about Four Seasons when it comes to travel.
At the same time, it’s changing people’s mindset about how our hotels are approaching food and beverage. We’re taking a much more progressive approach to how we do our restaurants. We only use specialty restaurant designers. We’re getting very passionate about mixology, about wine programs. If in a year’s time we’re able to go to an event and people are saying, “Wow, Four Seasons is really on the cutting edge of food and beverage,” then we’ll be very satisfied. I think this website is going to help us do that.
HOTELS: How do you think Taste might evolve over time going forward?
Rigby: Our focus at the moment is on launching it and getting it off the ground. There are a ton of different ideas people would love to see happen with this site. We’ve got a very robust agenda on this particular site. We’ve got a lot of moving pieces. People will be able to blog, they can comment, they can suggest ingredients, they can connect directly with chefs — it’s a very interactive site, which is very important for us. There are all sorts of interesting ways in which you can be engaged with this website. I think as we continue, most of the ideas that come out are ways in which we can have even more engagement with our customers, with our guests and with potential guests on this website. There are so many different opportunities. It’s exciting.