Beat bard poet Willie Shakespeare once penned the line “now is the winter of our discontent”, but for Thailand all you need to do is cut and paste summer into winter which then segues on to explain the current state of the national angst.
In 2020 Thai’s have not only lost their Songkran, but for the boys and girls of summer, manifested as a rising tide of outbound global travelers, they have been denied title roles in the wide world of Instagram gratification. No chic pics of France, Switzerland, Japan or Australia. Nada, sorry the door to the outside has been closed.
Fear. That’s it. Or more accurately FOMO (fear of missing out) has become a domestic plague of epic proportion. And here is what is interesting for the hotel and travel industry in Thailand is that Thai’s are once again learning to fall in love with their own country. Of course, in this case, the ‘love factor’ has been supercharged by the IG -Instagram mission of post til you drop.
Here in Phuket, speaking to OTA’s one of the most important learnings is the behavior changes of travelers in a Covid-19 world and how preferences are shifting. According to one of the larger booking providers, the top three locations searched for accommodation are Patong, Phuket Town and Koh Yao Yai. Certainly, no surprise with Patong, but the inclusion of the latter two clearly points to the relevance of domestic demand.
Start trolling Instagram or Facebook and look at images of these locations and you find food, panoramic bucket list photo opportunities and photogenic design hotels. Talking to hotels in picture perfect Phang Nga Bay, occupancy is relatively strong, though in no uncertain circumstance is the customer base the same. The disruption is here, and it might be just rolling in on a Rimowa, and weighed down by costume changes and digital accessories including tripods, mini drones and multiple devices.
For hotels in Phuket, the new norm is that summer will soon enough turn to winter. Reality is biting hard, but for now, THE MARKET is now, and for the foreseeable future, domestic travelers. Sadly, the Bangkok crowd’s perception of Phuket remains somewhat negative, with the perception of a wildly expensive destination, unaccommodating service and transportation and ultimately many Thai’s express that they feel unwelcome in Phuket to the extent of nearly feeling they are a stranger in their own country.
What the island now has, is the opportunity to learn and start to change its attitude towards domestic visitors. Over the past few months the mounting noise in social media is rising about expats feeling unwelcome in Thailand, or irate about dual prices. But, the very same can be said about how Phuket deals with local visitors. Seems everyone in Covid-19 is feeling unwelcome.
Trying to wrap this into a takeaway, I can probably say that despite a highly challenged hotel sector, is that some businesses are finding a way through the valley of the shadow of death (note Biblical reference to say it’s really bad out there). Adjusting customer bases, understanding Thai hotel guests on how and why they travel or what attracts them and at the end of the day, taking the opportunity to reinvent Thainess in Phuket is needed now and into the future. You may return to IG now.
One of my favorite comments during a recent virtual design event I co-organized was from a hipster bar concept consultant who recalled a trend-seeking client, sporting an epic brief that included finding a bartender with tattoos. The more tattoos the better.
Ironic? Yes. I do get the ink thing, but I also can vividly visualize the sheer number of tattoos on display at any Walmart, which makes its visceral inclusion in a brainstorming, cutting-edge innovation exercise appears both silly and superficial. Is this now the new barometer of what’s hot, bothered and an object of desire for a boutique hotel – a tattoo?
Over the past decade I have become more and more disturbed over how the hospitality industry has shifted its emphasis from people to the sheer idol worship of products. This journey down a dark noir landscape has turned into an obsession, with the simple example being the tattoo, and its whimsical objectification or representation of a creative mindset. Yes, it’s only ink and skin deep, but my mind eases back to trying to figure out, where did we go wrong? Very, very wrong.
My entire current existence, with a dark constant companion at my side (no doubt sporting a Grim Reaper tat), has nagging thoughts that often turn to the looming big sleep becomes completely unglued over a quick calculation over how many days or cumulative months of my life I’ve lost in hotel design meetings. Sadly, so much of the time spent recreating or essentially tweaking the same four walls of a guest room, time and time again. Bottom line, if there is such a thing is that hotel products and not people are the contemporary God’s whom we worship in blind and stupefying repetition.
When I was in my early teen rebellious years, I had a total fixation with rebel icon Che Guevara. The imagery of the mad, sad doomed guerilla was as potent as was his standing as a counterculture hero. But, what really got me over the line was not his inspirational lifestyle of revolution, but was his ever-present beret. The pre-hipster absolutely sucked me in as an unlikely student of anarchy. So, I went out and bought one.
To get to the point though, then as in now I had a massive head, looked totally ridiculous and still am not a person who should wear a hat under any circumstance. Or for that matter, a beret. In the end, the purity of Che’s message was completely missed over my misguided fix on the beret. I have never worn one nor should be allowed to, ever. For those readers who don’t know who Che is, his image along with the beret is a common sight on trucks and bus mud flaps throughout Thailand. My mistake was looking at the product and not the person.
Today, the tragically hip, design-oriented, fashionista-fueled fervor of boutique hotels is dominated by a maniacal view of materialism. Human capital has been relegated down to the dark, dank basement where in the movie Pulp Fiction they kept the gimp. Let’s not even go there. Tech has not helped either as it has created cult-like worship circles that echo total emptiness. Sorry, no one home.
At the end of the day, we have come to value a tat, more than understanding that as an industry that is challenged, desperate and changing as never before that people need to be put front and center in brand or idea development. Cut the noise, tear down the four walls and realize if boutique hotels are to a force of change and disrupt, that it’s people and not products that will lead those stranded in a vanilla desert of blandness back to the promised land. And one thing for sure, is those truly hip and cool individuals won’t be wearing a beret. Ever.
There is no mistaking the sound of a flushing toilet. It’s not a sudden rainstorm, or the whoosh of a juiced up, flash mob of joggers on steroids passing by on the street. Arguably, it’s a dirty little low-pitched thunder from down under that somehow triggers the gag reflex. Remember Trainspotting? Welcome to the world of Covid-19 creative collaboration with Zoom as the madcap captain of a voyage to nowhere.
One of the truly troubling misguided themes of the pre-pandemic trends of co-working, co-living, co-thinking, work from home but innovate in groups ethos was that collaboration was indeed the way forward for innovation including hotels. This is bullshit. Pure and simple. I’m sorry to those who say ‘you can’t say that?’ Well guess again, I just did.
I’m perplexed looking at the boutique hotel and resort space for comparables to group-led brands, but let me think back to the creative ideas that spurred an industry. From Adrian Zecha’s Amanjunkies, Andre Balazs at Standard, Ace’s Alex Calderwood or Ian Schrager in his many incarnations. Single-minded individuals who carved out great ideas.
Certainly, in most cases a bratty, ego-centric designer or two were key to the tasty cocktail that erupted into volcanic magic but this was not a kumbaya moment or group hug. Leave those to the crew at Walmart, though that’s all history with social distancing and thank God for that.
My point here is that the creative process, Eureka moment or flash in the pan is a solo endeavor that Google Teams just can’t moderate or hold court over. It has to have some edge, decisiveness, and there is no room for pats on the back to those who simply attend with meaningless feedback and a total lack of imagination. (Note to those types, Food Panda is actively hiring and if you want a pat on the back for silly ideas I suggest getting those piping hot tamales to the condo in under five minutes or less).
In a nutshell, creating genius hotels is about dogma, you don’t just walk the dog, but you go hard and fast like those speeding greyhounds trying to obliterate the speeding lure in just one vicious bite. They don’t run in packs and exchange small talk. In essence, it’s time to understand that the call to action needs to be a definitive ‘screw the group’ process.
In my hotel development advisory work some of my first words to would be developers are to be just that – BE THE DEVELOPER. Daddy up, be dogmatic, single-minded, obsessing over details. Don’t expect your hotel chain brandman in a suit and tie or worse in the boutique space, those faux-creatives who go sockless into meetings to lead you to salvation. The latter are indeed the worst, as they will only take a project down ‘Derivative Avenue’ and are best stuffed into a massive sock drawer down with the would-be hipster crowd with fresh ink tattoo’s and a six-day beard.
The past four months of my life can be summed up as a creative nightmare, as doing group meetings on Zoom, Google, Webex or any other weapons of mass destruction (remember that term – Georgie Bush and Tony Blair are still looking for them, maybe try the sock drawer fellas) are utterly failed in attempted collaboration. Be it some schmuck in Brussels or Atlanta who keeps muttering ‘can you hear me now?’, to the computer illiterate who has never figured out how to share documents.
All this nuttiness occurs as ten other people on the call try to look interested, be polite or my personal favorite being the one who just says to hell with me, turns off the video, mutes the mike and gets stuck into nachos and a margarita. Nothing good does or can come of these virtual snooze fests we have to now endure.
Which now leads me, in a staggering sort of way to where we came in. This, of course is how our virtual creative process has led to a nearby bathroom where someone who is afraid they will miss a single word of wisdom from the collective think piece, heads off to the toilet and forgets to mute. That sums up the meeting, as any possible positive ideas from the two-hour collaboration are essentially down the toilet in one quick flush.
My advice, if you want to create a great boutique hotel, go lock yourself up in a room alone, ignore the help of others and avoid nilla, vanilla wash-out group’s prayer circles at all cost. Dogma, baby, dogma, it’s a walk best walked alone.
Hong Kong’s position as one of the leading worldwide host cities for luxury hotel brands has long been an envious one. The line-up that includes Mandarin Oriental, Peninsula, Shangri-La, Rosewood and Langham is rapidly finding that the unique sense of corporate place has become a perilous balancing act.
Mind you, I sit on no political fence and readers need to understand this is a hotel analysis piece that transcends political agendas. But cutting to the point, the issue that these hotel groups will face sooner or later is a challenge of how to recast their future luxury brandscape as part of a greater mega-brand that is Mainland China.
I think we can pretty squarely say that rapid pace of change in Hong Kong is accelerating the integration of a bigger agenda and the incredibly unique positioning of Hong Kong’s brands abroad are going to shift from being home alone to one of going into a pace car’s slipstream in the lead up to a Formula One race.
Hotels are not the only ones who will have to contend with the change. From Cathay Pacific to HSBC our perception of Hong Kong is on the move and in reality no one knows where it will land. There are those who say Hong Kong’s reputation and legacy can carry on for decades as it’s too big to fail, while others would opt in that in the decade ahead it will be relegated as just another tertiary city within a bigger picture. I’d imagine the reality falls between the two.
But for the luxury hotel brands, there is no firm roadmap ahead given the Mainland’s limited overseas success with their own top-end hospitality brands. The question now for the Big 5 Hong Kong owned, based or controlled groups given the current business and political climate is what impact will transpire with their unique identities?
Some may say that the hotels either be forced to somehow manage the process and retain the current status quo, though the long-term reality is if they will continue to use Hong Kong as their flagship properties, that they will become in time Mainland Chinese brands. I’m not saying this is bad or good, but with certainty we can say it’s different.
What is a disconnect is that even Chinese travelers abroad look to foreign icons like Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton and others as preferred luxury cocoons. The entire idea of global hotel chains who created China specific brands has not gone as expected. The Mainland thirst to experience new and different things is at the cornerstone of their adventures abroad.
It’s not unthinkable that some of these brands may shift their homes or others may align move deeply into the Mainland as part of a bigger vision but 2020 is in essence the sounding of a drum that decisions must come sooner than later. Covid-19 will delay this but the pace of political change and potential volatility between the East and the West are creating a perfect storm that even a luxury Hermes umbrella might have a hard time keeping the driving rain off of them when walking near Victoria Harbour. Expect this year to be the trigger of brand angst for the Big 5 and where they land, no one really knows.
It’s Monday morning and my thought process has somehow hit the wall. Not literally mind you, but the thought of wearing a helmet and assuming the psyche of a crash test dummy just makes it all worse. My head has been literally spinning around in circles not unlike that classic case of devil possession in the Hollywood thriller ‘The Exorcist.’
My inner demons in this case are hotel interiors and the sad sorry state of the blah blah, same sameness of them all. As my days grow shorter with age and the big sleep comes up on the horizon, I can’t tell you how many days, weeks or perhaps even cumulative years I’ve compiled in design or operational meeting over guest rooms.
It is too mind numbing for words, but let’s have a go anyway. From legends in their own mind developers’ whose famous last words are ‘let’s think out of the box’, onto the Instagram cowboys (and girls) who flood your WhatsApp message box with images of very nice but totally irrelevant pictures of cutting edge boutique hotels from Albania to Timbuktu. Bury my heart in Pinterest
We’ve put bathtubs in living rooms, removed bathrooms, built in and then minimalized, but the end of the day, all these years later it’s just like Hotel Lego and there are still just four bloody walls and a bed, two or three (family rooms for the latter). All those aspirational thoughts go up in smoke and disruption is left to smarter industries like tech.
What I don’t get about hotels is the finality of interiors. Sure five, seven or ten years down the track you get a second or third chance, it’s a bit like marriage. But just like marriage those days, weeks and months leading up to change can be utter hell (note to self, ensure wife does not read this, though readers note this is in fact my third wife).
The dilemma of the process is that it’s pure inertia, and a total archaic stonewalling of the human need to be adaptive, moody, or want different experiences in the span of the time we spend in our hotel room. Why can’t hotels be like retail, where there are often four walls but the areas can evolve by the time of day, season, occasion or preferences? For all its worth hotels today are not similar to the caves humans dwelled in at the dawn of time. Nothing moves or changes. There are dinosaurs outside though, both now and then.
This theory of mine goes straight on down the line of hotel interiors from the madness of the two-class system of front and back of house (remember when Trump said Mexico was going to pay for the Wall?), to lobbies, outlets, and all the rest of these sadly inflexible spaces with their potential unfulfilled. It’s tragic and I have a hard time believing the hotel trade is so incredibly mindless to not change this backward thinking.
I look at my friends who work in tech, or retail and perhaps I’m blind but they don’t really seem that much smarter than I am, so who’d to blame, everyone and no one is maybe the best explanation.
But my entire rant here is not just a negative slant on the hotel trade, but it’s recognizing the upside and opportunity to disrupt a broken industry. Be it augmented or virtual reality, complexed multi-branded properties or a total shift away from the concept of four walls its time thing change and what better time than a crisis when disaster and opportunity are just a heartbeat away.
Hey, you, the one in black at the the back of the room, are listening?
From buffets, to welcome drinks, overly standardized offerings and no sense of space utilization, hotel restaurant and bar design remains a highly institutionalized vanilla-flavored train wreck. You can already tell how the story is going to play out, when you premise that hotel operators lump what should be brand opportunities into a sorry, sad basket called outlets.
I’m a hotelier by trade, but am man enough to know how we get things wrong and it’s time to change. Let’s start at the beginning of the disaster about to happen, as the hotel technical service group and others issue out an area program, brand standards and outlet concepts. The disconnect starts here as those doing the work will unlikely ever be involved in the actual operation, have little direct market knowledge nor have a financial stake in the hotel aside from being an employee of a greater entity. Bingo, the recipe for disaster starts here.
I often draw the comparison between freestanding restaurants and bars, who in many cases pay rent and as such look to invest in what their customers feel, see or pay for, versus non-revenue generating space. Essentially, they look at real estate yields, while hotels have their own behemoth metrics of RevPar, GOP, NOI etc. No apples to apples here and that’s a problem.
So, of course hotel owners end up developing massive cavernous back of house areas, kitchens, offices, bulk storage areas that drive up their investment under the doctrine of brand standards versus financial sense or returns. Go into a freestanding restaurant and see the chef in an off-meal period sitting at a table doing their paperwork or the manager doing the same. Hotel operators seemingly didn’t get the memo about hot desks and love the cocoon in the back of house which is as remote an outpost from customers as say, North Korea.
Go next into the hierarchy or bureaucracy of a food and beverage department versus again bars and restaurants. Direct accountability, massive infrastructure and again the focus on the bigger machine versus the customers. All of this is simply set up to fail and one of the key accelerating trends of Covid-19 is that hotel outlets will suffer from considerably lower numbers, and cannot hide under the larger hotel profit and loss statement. Their day of accountability has come.
Over the past few years on a number of hotel projects I have advised on I have recommend separating bar and restaurant designers from rooms and public areas. The entire concept of a certain look for a hotel across all the areas has gone the way of the Titanic. It has sunk to the bottom in no uncertain terms. The smartphone changed hotels forever from budget to luxury travels as everyone knows what’s outside on offer in every possible eating of drinking niche. You need specialists, best in class designers and concept, not a bland one size fits all approach.
Flexible space is another problem especially in resorts where breakfast can be full to the brim and the restaurant then mimics Zombieland the rest of the day and night. If you were paying rent for this space like a freestanding bar or restaurant you’d never even consider this model, so why is it hotel operators expect owners to deliver the massive white elephant of an all-day dining outlet that is a one-trick pony? Instead, these days I look to tell clients to deconstruct spaces, they can shift use for lunch or dinner and alternate uses. Learn from retail, where space planning can be so much more flexible.
Another missed opportunity is the lifecycle of hotel outlets that can only change every four or five years. In retail, you can change space by the time of day, season or special periods. There is space to be creative on a recurring basis and not just rely on a one time design that can and will grow boring and redundant. Again, hotels give little regard for the customer experience that offers so little imagination toward ambience, atmosphere or special occasions. Wonder why Uber Eat or FoodPanda now rule the space?
There are truly so many more examples of how hotels do little service for their owners or fail as restaurants and bars that my rant really has to wrap up or it will be as redundant as hotel outlets have become. In symbolic terms, the sheer silliness of hotels putting their brands on nametags into places of eating and drinking makes me think I’m at a McDonalds. Which, if I want cheap eats after some hard drinking is not bad thing, but if you want more, expect every little detail, every little space to matter more than it does now.
During this ongoing crisis and times to follow hotel eating and dining has to change or else it is as doomed as the Titanic. Now is the time to man the torpedos and change the thinking behind what’s important and what’s not.
Let me tell you a story. Growing up in what is now becoming a distant memory, but one key omission from my adolescence is that we did not have the internet. It did not exist. As a boy, my best set of friends would gather and talk in the schoolyard about what we had watched on television the night before. It ended up being a form of collective trending in an age before twitter hashtags.
As there were just three major TV networks to choose from, the options were rather limited. Today, there is no niche too small, no fetish left unturned or wiki too wacky. My mind spins out just trying to say that last line. Anyway, choice is everywhere, except sadly the hotel business did not get the memo.
My mood today is somewhat one of a pent-up agitated soul who needs to rant, roll and stomp out of the room in near violent disarray. Someone misplaced the door so I can’t even properly slam it. At the root of my current neurosis, sitting on two plates in a nameless hotel somewhere out there is a croissant and a club sandwich. Seemingly innocent fare you might think, but let’s turn the page and jump over to the dark side.
Despite hoteldom these days packaging themselves in shabby chic, slightly rustic new clothes, that shout about being local, authentic, experiential and part of the neighborhood, the reality is they treat their guests like idiots. Take out a menu in most hotels and yes, you will indeed find the two C’s at certain times of the day – the breakfast croissant and later in the day the club sandwich. These are two staple hotel food items but what they represent is malevolent worship of what have become food factories. Back of the house, shelves are stacked with institutional dried food or giant tins of liquid goo. Kitchens resemble factory lines. It’s ugly, tasteless and makes absolutely no sense. Choice went out the back door and never came back.
Fast forward into the present movement of farm-to-table hotels. Yes, I’m not quite sure what term best to use as a buzz saw grinds in the back of my head, be it food-to-fork, or plant-to-plate. What this exciting space acknowledges is that every hotel menu does not have to sport the same items. Be it by the season, location, culture or day of the week, foods can come and go. The menu is not something you print by the year, but by the day or by the meal.
I’ve recently been consulting on a farm-to-food resort hotel and was stressing over a huge back of house bakery that of course included machinery for making croissants. Suddenly, the heavens parted and the realization came to convert the pizza making wood fired oven into a morning bakery. Fresh breads, local-styles rolls, after all who needs croissants? Anyone who has met me understands I am a man of a somewhat largish size and indeed love a good French style croissant, but the drastic plastic deflated miniature footballs you find at a Marriott or Hilton breakie buffet is something I can live without.
The same can be said for a club sandwich. Again, when well done it’s a thing of beauty or else totally necessary with a 3 am call to room service to soak up a late night bender. But again, why can’t hotels simply use local ingredients, create their own menu and not try to mass produce the same menu time and time again in a nasty rendition of Groundhog Day. If it’s fresh, or local, I’m in.
Today, we are seeing a brave new world of farm-to-table hotels not relying on imported or shipped from far food items, but sourcing close to home. Acting sustainably and buying from smaller suppliers. The underlying connection back to the earth from where the food is coming from and the ultimate product is astonishing. It is giving diners the chance to appreciate the craft of cooking.
While it’s unlikely that many large hotels will join the revolution and celebrate the culture of individualism in food, the current crisis and reduced numbers certainly gives the industry an opportunity to view what a better model this could be going forward. Farm-to-table hotels are indeed here to stay and given a choice of a croissant, a club sandwich or a menu that changes each time I’m there, well the latter wins hands down.
It’s been said that farming is a profession of hope and I’m hopeful more hotels start understanding their customers can think for themselves and actually choose a unique menu item instead of a croissant or club sandwich.
