The Soul Of A Luxury Hotel

As a man approaching his 40th birthday, I feel I’ve earned the right to, every now and then, have an existential crisis.  Usually, this involves discovering new hair growing in places it absolutely shouldn’t be, or contemplating something utterly banal, but still ready to shout at the clouds.  Bastard clouds.  Sometimes these moments come after spending time with a remote tribe, like the Samburu in Kenya.  This time, they came from spending too much time in a place built with too much money: Royal Mansour Tamuda Bay.  My review of that property drifted so spectacularly off topic that, even by my standards, it needed its own article.  So here we are.

This feels like a continuation of The Joy of Personality because I can’t help thinking that hoteliers are making a fundamental mistake in how they think about the game they’ve chosen to play.

So, there I was in Royal Mansour Tamuda Bay, trying to suss what was missing from a property owned by a king, with the clearly intended ambition of beating the shit outta all the competition.  Look at the pictures, the spec, the facilities – it does just that.  Undeniably an impressive property.  But, it did not speak to me.  More like we’d had a fight and I’d been sent me to sleep on the sofa, without my lucky wanking sock.  I felt luxuried out.  Like there is a maximum amount of luxury you can handle in life, and I’d just hit the limit.  Suddenly, the appreciation is no longer there.  #savethetravelagents.  JustGiving for me, anyone?  Anyone?  Guys?  

I could admire the seashell artwork throughout the lobby, the beautiful mosaics in the room, and the endless touches of craftsmanship and design.  But none of it felt new.  Just another hotel in a very long line of them.  But that feels like the trend these days.  When was the last time you went to a new hotel and thought it wasn’t gorgeous and everything wasn’t meticulous?  What I’m describing is another One&Only Aesthesis.  Or One&Only Kea Island.  Ok, I’ll stop picking on One&Only now.

But when was the last time I stayed at a new hotel and was blown away by what often matters most: the service?  Raffles London, perhaps.  Two years ago.  Now, every new hotel needs some new catch, or Instagrammable bullshitty experience, mostly creating so-called solutions to problems that don’t exist.  I don’t know if we’ll be looking back at this in 20 years’ time laughing at it, or feeling depressed.  But the service has become an afterthought, not a priority.

So as I was having conversations with Lucie about this, I then started reading the wonderful book, Checking In, by the brilliant Jannes Sörensen, previously GM of The Beaumont.  I’ve known Jannes for well over 15 years.  Long before Lucie and I met, he actually hired her at The Connaught.  So, without Jannes, I’d have no wife and no kids.  I think this makes him family.  And as family, he owes us a considerable backlog of babysitting.

But family politics aside, I was thoroughly impressed by the book.  Even knowing Jannes well and how wonderful a GM and person he is, I wasn’t expecting it to resonate as much as it did.  I only bought the book cos I like Jannes.  I imagined it would end up on my bookshelf, and one day my kids would inherit it and think Dad was so clever for having so many books; unknown to them, I’ve maybe read the cover, or at least one review on the back.  But I read it in a few days.  It’s one of the more thought-provoking books I’ve read in a long time.  Less about hotels, more about happiness, purpose, human connection, and what hospitality can teach us.  It was saying everything I was feeling, but in a far more articulate way.

The new age of luxury

I have been staying in luxury hotels on a near-semi-permanent basis for almost 20 years now.  In the end, so many of them simply become another hotel.  Another hundred-million-dollar property.  Actually, make it a billion – that seems to be the new norm.  Another artisanal welcome drink.  More marble.  More tech.  More and more and more.

Eventually, your brain starts treating objectively ridiculous things as completely normal.  Luxury slowly stops feeling luxurious.  Your standards drift upwards so gradually that one day you realise you’ve become emotionally unmoved by things that would have blown your mind 5 years earlier.  But the one thing that still hasn’t changed is emotional connection to a place.  A big part of that is the hippy-dippy bullshit word: soul.  Because a building itself means very little.  Some hotels can look spectacular, but very few make you feel like you’re at home.  And last I checked, a lot of us like our homes.  Luxury hotels have become very good at building impressive resorts, whilst becoming far-from-good at building places people emotionally connect with.  There’s a big difference between admiring a hotel and actually loving being in it.

Luxury has become formulaic.  There are fewer people interested in working in the industry, yet more demand than ever for the product.  The solution seems to be subterfuge.  Have you seen a new spa lately?   Cryotherapy, blood transfusions, and rubbing stinging nettles on your testicles.  Ok, I made the last one up, but you believed it, didn’t you?  Luxury hospitaity has too often become a product.  The Four Seasons website is an e-commerce transaction; they’re not even trying to hide it anymore.  

Meanwhile, the easiest win is to focus on training the staff.  But, for reasons I don’t quite understand, it doesn’t seem to happen.  Is it because it’s harder to measure?  It’s easy to tell if your F&B offering is great if you have nine restaurants.  Box ticked.  But knowing your guests are truly happy?  Bit more subjective.

And it’s clearly always been hard, but with the influx of new openings, it’s becoming even harder.  I can vidily remember some stays due to the people I’ve come across, even long before the absolute boom of the last five years of luxury travel.  I mean genuine hospitality.  I know so much of it is fake; these people clapping to greet me are not all thrilled to see me, or the other ninety thousand people they’ve done it for that year.  But there are people who make you feel as though they’ve genuinely been looking forward to your arrival, because they have.  People who create moments that no architect, designer, or consultant can manufacture.  I don’t know if we should call these people psychopaths or heroes, but they are the soul of a property.

Conclusion

Let me be clear, I’m not saying put your cheque books away (anyone still use those?) and give up on building spectacular properties.  Who doesn’t love shiny new things?  And they are what get people to go in the first place.  Plus, competition is good.  But, with such a focus on the hard product, the thing that made hotels such a joy has become neglected: the people.  Is this going to turn out to be another thing we can blame on social media, as ten-second clips of a room with a plunge pool where a floating breakfast on a board of dinosaur bones is an easier viral moment than offering something genuine?  Probably.

The hotels I remember most aren’t necessarily the most expensive or visually impressive.  They’re the ones that made me feel something.  They’re the places where the staff had personality, and where the experience felt human and authentic.  In other words, the places with soul.  Yep, I’ve used that word again.  Sue me.

Nobody comes home talking about the marble samples the owner approved three years earlier.  An actual moment of connection with another person, in a world currently dominated by loneliness and machines replacing everyone.  That’s the soul of a luxury hotel.  And it’s the one thing money still can’t build.