Being Informal Is the Future of Luxury Guest Relations

“I believe the future of service will be based in informality. It has to be more relaxed, more instantaneous, more of a real-life contact with people,” said Dominic Gorham, guest relation manager at Oslo’s modern luxury hotel The Thief. Gorham is somewhat of a guru in the hospitality industry, building his portfolio in Paris where for 18 years he opened a number of bars, clubs and restaurants frequented by celebrities and luxury travelers. In 2013, Gorham made the move to hotels with the opening of The Thief in Oslo. The Thief is a design luxury hotel, named the best hotel in Northern Europe by Condé Nast Traveler in 2016, and home to almost all celebrities that pass through Oslo. Gorham takes charge of both the property’s VIP and usual guests, but no matter the client, Gotham believes informality is the future of luxury. “We meet people on an equal level. We’re very close to our clientele and guests. We interact with them on a regular basis. We discuss, we joke, we story tell. We have a contact with our people instead of building a barrier, which a lot of people do when they do formal…which can be done well,” Gorham said. Gorham embodies a cultural shift in how we define luxury today. His comments reflect a change in the industry in which hoteliers around the world are redefining luxury and refining their approach to make their service more personable and nuanced for even the most  distinguished of guests. In speaking with executives at luxury hotels in London, Oslo, Monaco, Cape Town, California and the Caribbean, we learned more about the shifting nature of luxury service. "Informality is spreading through the hospitality business and classic hospitality has changed. In the past staff used to have to be clean shaven, cover up tattoos and not have any visible piercings. Now it�