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How these top hoteliers are competing with disruptors

Hospitality is being fundamentally redefined by Airbnb, upscale hostels, co-working spaces and concepts like mindfulness. The hotel industry is responding to changing demographics and psychographics with lifestyle brands that sell new experiences and services. But is it enough?

To gain greater insight into how hoteliers are competing, HOTELS gathered eight industry leaders from companies including Hyatt, Accor, Hilton, Ennismore and others recently for a roundtable hosted by The Wall Street Journal. Below, they talk about disruptors and their responses – and find out how they are addressing the wellness juggernaut in a related story.

Sharan Pasricha, founder, Ennismore: "Our view is where you stay today says so much more about who you are than it did 10 years ago."
Sharan Pasricha, founder, Ennismore: “Our view is where you stay today says so much more about who you are than it did 10 years ago.”

With a great hotel experience becoming the new measurement of success, hoteliers are reinventing public spaces to become more accessible and training staff to operate less scripted and to act more like themselves to interact more authentically. HOTELS asked the panel where they are focusing their attention in response to new sets of guest expectations.

HOTELS: What are you doing to more effectively compete with disruptors, and how much will the co-working concept impact your plans?

Danny Hughes, president, Americas, Hilton: All the modern technology and data is helping make the hotel life easier and more efficient. But it’s still interactions between people that really make life beautiful. So far, we haven’t found a way to replicate that. More and more now it’s authentic interactions people are looking for. The concept or the word ‘authentic’ can’t be used enough… We’re being forced as an industry, as we all get more and more diverse, to work very hard to create experiences that are memorable for people. That’s the biggest change I think in our world.

Brad Wilson, president, Atelier Ace: I think that experience is the key, right? And that’s what has actually moved the industry over the last several years. Whether it be reinventing a lobby or reinventing restaurants and what they mean in hotels. Co-working is the logical next extension experience. It makes perfect sense to combine it with a hotel to reinvent how that location and work environment come together… Picture co-working with rooms in Tulum – so if I work from home, I just go there, I plug in, I have my own office all the time, but I live in my little bungalow on the beach. So it’s the idea of co-working and how it makes access to experiences even bigger…

Sharan Pasricha, founder, Ennismore: Our view is where you stay today says so much more about who you are than it did 10 years ago. So travelers are a lot more conscious about the decisions they make about where they stay, especially in the social digital age. There is a convergence of the lobby morphing into co-working, morphing into F&B, morphing into meeting spaces. I think this is a time for hotels like ours to get ahead of the game and think that through.

Greg Doman, senior vice president of development, Accor: Convergence is a key word in terms of live, work, play, and transforming those experiences across all brands, and following those guests across those experiences.

Hughes: The co-working trend is changing design… Traditional programming is evolving, reactivating and reenergizing public spaces. They are not just somewhere to go and have a drink now. So we’re actually looking at all the programming, and it’s helped us evolve, to find these zones that can be multi-use throughout the day and have different interactions.

Wilson: We’ve abandoned the concept of business centers and we believe in the concept of people working and that kind of nomad thing. But there is a definition that even co-working is obsolete. It’s like, ‘I don’t even need to go to WeWork because I could be on a beach.’ There’s potential for hotels to leverage that and make that easier with supporting technology – a lot of WiFi capacity.

Avi Brosh, co-founder, PaliSociety: From my own personal experience exploring integrating co-working into a platform, although at 30,000 feet it sounds like it’s the hospitality business, it’s fundamentally a completely different business than lodging. To do it in earnest you either have to integrate an existing platform into your platform, or if you want to do it yourself, there is a learning curve. It is really challenging for a lodging company to set up… We’ve explored it and when we were fairly down the road we ended up just jettisoning it because it just really wasn’t congruent with growing the lodging business and the brand. 

Pasricha: I’d love to offer a slightly contrarian view… We’ve been running a co-working business for 10 years and we just haven’t charged people for it. It’s in our lobbies… So we’ve now decided to launch a co-working brand within a hotel. We have 1,000 desks (about 60,000 square feet, or 20%-25% of the hotel space) and it’ll be membership based…. We’re having fun thinking about desk service, like you would think about room service. Could you get a pizza or a burger down to your desk in 25 minutes? So I think really trying to differentiate the offering by leaning closer to the hotel. Our view is it’s a lot easier to run a co-working business as a hospitality company than it would if you’re not.

Wilson: If you want to create authentic experiences, you need to do what you do for the right audience. Generally speaking, that’s not your hotel guests. It’s like a lecture that I give all my general managers over and over and over: do not go to your coffee bar and think about what you should be doing to get hotel guests to buy your coffee; think about who’s coming in off the street. If they’re not coming in off the street, you’re going out of business. It’s the same with co-work: you’ll be successful because you built a product that’s right for that customer. If you build a co-working environment thinking that your hotel people are going to fill it, it will go bankrupt. It’s thinking like an experiential operator.

Bill Walshe, CEO, Viceroy Hotel Group: Sometimes the success will come from choosing not to pursue an idea… Everybody wants to disrupt so let’s have a chief disruption officer in the business. To me, you must have purpose to disrupt positively. Disruption without purpose is interruption. All you’re doing is getting in the way of your own business… I want to create an environment that recognizes the evolution of behaviors of my guests – where they want to work, at any time, in any way, at any point within the hotel, and it’s up to me to facilitate that…

If you go to a party, the least cool person in the room is always the person trying their hardest to be the coolest person in the room. It’s no different in our industry. If you set out to try and be cool, by definition you won’t because some of the best disruptors and best innovations are accidental. You look back and you suddenly see a moment that happened, and you think, ‘I wasn’t expecting it, but I embraced it.’ So it’s as much about reaction to behaviors in society, behaviors within our customer base, and how we react. We can’t shape behavior.

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