Business Traveller (Asia-Pacific)
Changing rooms
A new breed of lifestyle hotel brands aims to help you balance work and leisure – but are they right for the business traveller? Jenny Southan reports
The world’s ten largest hotel chains now offer a combined 113 brands, 31 of which didn’t exist a decade ago, it was recently reported. A portion of these, such as Hyatt’s Andaz and Marriott International’s Edition, are “lifestyle” concepts that are designed to appeal to urbane, 21st-century travellers – cultured, young, tech-savvy mobile workers. And the trend is gathering momentum, as the number of new brands being unveiled is reaching a crescendo – this year there are a flurry of arrivals, from Canopy and Even, to Vib and Jaz in the City.
What are they? Lifestyle properties embody a more boutique feel than their traditional “cookie cutter” counterparts, and are a way for multinational chains to express a sense of individuality and personality that people are looking for, along with – to a greater or lesser degree – uniform facilities and standards of service. They can also be differentiated from collections of independent, individual properties that are being “curated” by big chains, such as Tribute Portfolio by Starwood and Curio by Hilton.
The modus operandi seems to be for hotels to provide more informal service, value for money (although some are at the luxury end of the spectrum), convenient locations and a sense of place through décor and locally sourced produce. In the past, the fact that brands prided themselves on providing the same environment whether guests were in Moscow or Manila was a comfort – nowadays, not everyone wants to be so cocooned.
Travel writer Anna Hart says: “My generation doesn’t aspire to chainhotel, five-star luxury; we possess no brand loyalty. There is far more social kudos in sourcing an underthe-radar find. Travel is still about showing off, but we want to show off our good taste and travel smarts, not our salary bracket.”
A lot of it is marketing, of course. In reality, many of the new arrivals aren’t offering anything wildly innovative – just more colourful design, open-plan lobby lounges and free wifi, for example – but they are trying to tap into a new mindset, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Parag Vohra, general manager for hotels at Sojern, a data platform to help brands engage with travellers, says: “It used to be that consistency trumped everything, but lifestyles have changed. If you do all this research into changing tastes and alter the lodging experience [accordingly], then you should go out and have a narrative to explain what you have done.” He adds: “Sometimes it is easier to build a brand from scratch than to have an audience unlearn perceptions.”
Is there a limit to how many subbrands a chain can have? Fred Finn, “the world’s most travelled person”, according to Guinness World Records (he has flown 22.5 million kilometres and made 718 flights on Concorde), says: “All of these brands are confusing – I suppose they are trying to get every angle of the marketplace from the lower to the upper end covered. But how many can the market take?”
Marriott International has 19 brands in total, from Ritz-Carlton and Renaissance in the luxury segment to Courtyard and Fairfield Inn at the
select-service end. It also has four lifestyle concepts. Markus Lehnert, vice-president of international hotel development, says: “You want to avoid any of your customers drifting, so wherever your customer goes, you want to have a hotel.”
He adds: “In Europe we have about 50 per cent of our rooms in lifestyle brands and the other 50 per cent in more traditional brands; worldwide, it is 15 per cent lifestyle. So Europe is showing the way to go.” But Vohra warns: “As these chains introduce more brands, they should take a hard look at which ones they could retire, as every one of them requires resources to maintain.”
At age 75, what kind of places does Finn stay in? “I prefer traditional, full-service hotels that know I am coming, ”he says. “I just sign in and within a few minutes someone is calling to ask if my room is alright. I like Marriott because they are pretty much everywhere and I have stayed with them since they started. I also stayed in the new Conrad in Dubai recently and it was fantastic.”
On average, Finn spends 15 to 20 days a month in hotels – and reckons he has slept in more than 7,000 hotel beds since he started travelling in 1958.