Changes in travellers’ attitudes to luxury are leading to a demand for new hotel experiences that in turn are redefining hotel design and concepts of hospitality. Now hotels are daring to be different: public spaces are becoming multipurposed and interaction with guests is being reinvented through the use of new technology. Hotels are integrating with their locality more fully with than ever before.
Until relatively recently, hotel brands worldwide offered their guests a consistent and predictable experience. The epitome of clever marketing strategy, probably dreamed up by those Sixties’ Mad Men types, offered the reassurance of home comforts to typical air-traveller executives. It promised the transportation and landing of cultural values with no local roots, contrasting points, or sense of belonging.
But however valid this strategy may have been at the time, it led to a complete blandness in branding – to sameness, uniformity and standardisation. This predictability materialised more recently in the phrase now widely deployed in hotel marketing: ‘Home away from home’. Yet evidence of guest experiences shows that domestic familiarity is exactly what the hotel guest does not want.
While travellers have come to rely on a uniformity of service across a brand portfolio, they are also reacting to ‘branded clichés’, at least as far as the environmental experience is concerned. Many travellers (whether they do so for business or pleasure) desire a more exciting experience than what is presented by their everyday lives. They want to meet others, socialise and feel part of the place and its culture, even during a short stay.
Guest attitudes and expectations, now less mundane and more worldly, are reshaping hotel spaces to reflect ‘über living’ styles that have little in common with the concept of home. These new directions are affecting the look and feel of environments and will dictate the meaning of hospitality in the future.
New hotels will increasingly want to offer a superior residential experience that is more theatrical, multisensual and dynamic; where the boundaries of functionality and space are blurred, and where concepts of personal space, along with guest interaction, are reconsidered.
Preconceptions of functionality and practicality that, until recently, were as ubiquitous as the Gideon Bible by the hotel bed are now being challenged. For example, the need for a grand lobby space is in many cases a thing of the past. The widespread use of mobile technologies has removed the necessity for formal check-ins in large open spaces that facilitate a level of surveillance. Guests now may be greeted much more informally.
As with any experience involving social or direct ‘one-to-one’ interaction, the approach to service is fundamental and the creation of a positive first impression key. The physical choreography of this interactive and more personal greeting ceremony has developed a new sequence of movement between the greeter and the arriving guest who, as they learn the new steps, will find the experience more fluid and natural, and this new welcoming approach will affect the hotel experience at many levels of the market.
While some old-school luxury hotels will heighten the experience by creating a personalised and very private moment, the new business hotels are embracing more fully the latest forms of service enabled by new technologies.
Imagination’s current project, the Andaz hotel in Delhi, a Hyatt-owned global brand, aims to satisfy a new generation of stylish business travellers in search of a characterful sense of place. The hotel reinterprets the vocabulary of luxury and service as we know it: check-in formalities along with lobby counters have been replaced by a simple conversation with the help of an iPad and printer. The only furniture to be seen is a sculptural ‘gravitational’ anchor unit that wouldn’t look out of place in Tate Modern.
The potential to deal with this rather different lobby space in innovative and imaginative ways – to entertain, inform and delight – is enormous. This is an open field for the development of a new approach to design that balances aestheticism and functionality while supplementing human interaction. In this context bespoke concierge services, tailored to individual needs and fully integrated into the ethos of the lobby, become paramount.
Our multi-tasked lifestyle and 24/7 obsession with digital working tools have also exposed the need for multifunctional spaces, where the ideas of social interaction and work live hand in hand. Work and leisure are now blended, simultaneous activities.
Lobbies become not just drinking places but also working spaces. The classic meeting room format is transformed into a casual studio lounge, where kitchen areas and personal chefs make shared break-up times feel more like late-night parties. Guest-room layouts push hotel boundaries even further, as bathrooms become over-scaled personal spas with walk through spaces that integrate into sleeping and relaxing areas.
It is also at the value end where the potential benefit of introducing technology will be realised as staff and service resources become less available.
At CitizenM Hotels, the traveller is welcomed by prefabricated design. Here luxury accommodation is available at low prices thanks to the streamline production of the building’s modular capsules. Targeting the more open-minded mobile citizens, this new breed of hotels are energy efficient, low-cost and low maintenance.
The entire seamless experience is almost self-service, but fun and unusual. The guest-room capsule is small but every aspect has been effectively designed in order to maximise its potential: an open wash area and a futuristic-looking shower capsule and a wall-to-wall king-size bed that occupies half the available space.
As choices and brand competition becomes ever more fierce, it is how seamless integration of technology will be used to supplement human interaction that will count. The transition will occur internally, as traditional hotel spaces are opened up to new uses and, externally, our understanding of local cultures and contexts are extended. These new dimensions will be integral to what the future’s definition of luxury means.
Most fundamentally however, it is the human quality of attention to detail and service that is timeless; that has, and always will, differentiate the mundane and forgettable from those hotel experiences that we remember fondly.
