Interview: Four Seasons CEO on Building a New Kind of Loyalty

Editor’s Note: Skift is running a series of interviews with hospitality CEOs talking about the Future of the Guest Experience and the evolving expectations and demands of hotel guests. Check out all the interviews as they come out here. This continues our series of CEO interviews, the previous series was on the Future of Booking, with online travel CEOs. With fewer than 100 properties, Four Seasons as a hotel brand regularly punches above its weight in the crowded hospitality field. It is bulking up though, with 70 openings planned over the next six years. Over the last weekend in October, it opened its largest property, which is the only independent hotel on the Walt Disney World grounds in Orlando, and a new property in Moscow, Russia, which was built on the site of a landmark Soviet property. CEO J. Allen Smith stepped into his role in September 2013. As hotel CEOs go, he was rather unexpected. Unlike his predecessor, as well as his counterparts at many other hotel brands, he did not spend decades in hospitality. Rather, he was plucked from the chief executive role at Prudential Real Estate Investors, where he had developed a deep knowledge of the real estate and development side of the hotel business. That has come in handy as Four Seasons rethinks the model for getting properties financed, developed, and built. Skift met with Smith at the company's new Orlando property. An edited version of the interview is below: Skift: After the terrible 2008-2009 years, a lot of companies reassessed, reevaluated, looked at their priorities. I'm wondering what you feel the current state is now and how hospitality brands are thinking about the guest and in their experiences. Smith: Well, obviously, I can opine on how Four Seasons is thinking about it most authoritatively. There are probably a couple themes that Four Seasons is focused on. One is this notion of customization, which frankly is something that I think many people would associate Four Seasons with doing very well heretofore, in terms of understanding our guests, catering to their very specific needs, and that sort of thing. What is apparent from the way technology continues to develop and penetrate our lives in all realms of consumer activity, is that the consumer is expecting that you know ever more about them and their preferences. That's part of why I say that part of our challenge, and part of the challenge that much of the industry is dealing with right now in different wa