Keeping Up With the Escalating Standards in Luxury Hospitality
Skift Take
On Experience
Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.One of the often unseen things about luxury hospitality is how quickly things go from the extraordinary to the expected. Just as hedge fund traders are always looking for some small optimization to find “alpha” and beat the market, hoteliers at the highest end are in the same boat. They’re constantly fighting to find the strategies and tactics to stand out in a world of very high competition and very high expectations.
Simply put: Luxury travelers today see more scenarios. They are more mobile, have seen more at every level of the game, and have ever-rising expectations on what they get for their money.
The idea behind this piece struck me as I was having a drink with Jean Luc Naret, an esteemed hotelier who now runs La Réserve Paris, which won the distinction of Best Hotel in the World in Condé Nast Traveler’s 2017 Readers’ Choice Awards. Naret and his team are competing at the Olympian level of the game.
As we chatted in the hotel’s bar, I couldn’t find anything amiss. Everything down to how I was greeted on arrival, to the hue of the lights, the sound of the music, and the presentation of our drinks was pitch-perfect. Later in the evening when I was catching up with a friend in the hotel’s library bar, I asked a waiter about how high the standards were. He playfull
