Video: Hotel Design Must Be Supplemented With Discovery

Craig Greenberg, president, and Alice Gray Stites, VP, Museum Director, at 21c Museum Hotels, spoke at the Skift Global Forum. Their presentation focused on “Art, Culture & the Experience Economy: Learning is the New Luxury.”

Stites and Greenberg described how guests at 21c typify the next generation consumer who prioritizes educational learning during travel because of its power to generate transformative experiences. They stressed that 21c’s experiential programming around art and design was developed for the growing number of people who want to cultivate new perspectives by seeing new things and meeting new people.

“Curiosity about what is new and what is next is nearly universal, and when peaked, it’s practically insatiable,” said Stites. “Sharing a discovery experience deepens our relationships to the people, places and ideas that we encounter and then remember.”

Greenberg asserted that experiential innovation is far more important than incremental innovations, such as embedding technology, or other traditional focus areas for hotels. The future of hotel development and the luxury segment, he suggested, is no longer about design-centric bells and whistles, high thread counts, and fancy finishes. Design must be supplemented with discovery.

This is the latest Skift Global Forum 2015 video we have posted. Over the rest of the month we’ll release each of the three dozen-plus presentations from the 2015 Skift Global Forum. To keep track of them all, bookmark Skift Global Forum.

Watch the video, above, for the full presentation.

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