The hotel sector has always been more interested in flexibility from the guest rather than the hotel. Dinner is at a certain time, breakfast is at a certain time, lunch may not exist at all, but if you could wear a tie then that would be appreciated. Oh, and if you could make all your travel plans around specific arrival and departure times, that would make life a lot easier, cheers.
There has been some relaxation on the tie thing in recent years, in some locations at least, but flexibility has yet to be the industry’s watchword. The guest still bends themselves around the will of the hotel and allows themselves to be gaslit as to what is normal behaviour. Of course this can go both ways and the suspension of reality allows even the most wholesome of guests to think that it’s just fine to have 16 hash browns with the buffet breakfast and a bespoke pancake, many thanks.
The pandemic, with its rigid rules on face masks, staying at home, not licking everything when you’re in public, has, nonetheless, forced a certain flexibility. Office workers who needed a certain type of desk, chair and mug are now working contorted at the end of the sofa, feet maimed by fallen Lego. Travel is best taken in a car with the windows open and our face to the sun. We have all become Golden Retrievers.
For hotels, this is likely to cause issues. The most flexibility anyone has shown in recent years was Hilton’s Motto brand, which saw flexible rooms with living spaces and sofas which could become beds, inspired by the rise of the emerging lifestyle hostel model and not, it said, not not not by Airbnb.
So, with that clear, back to the pandemic. The recent results season illustrated that lower-priced leisure travellers was the only guest available, which was a shame as the large, global operators have not skewed their models to make massive sacks of cash from the lower-priced leisure traveller. This has led to a shift in the demand hunt, although there have been denials that it meant a move towards the OTAs, whose model was already making massive sacks of cash from the lower-priced leisure traveller.
As IHG CEO Keith Barr told us at In Sync earlier this year, hotels which had traditionally looked to the international corporate traveller were going to have to work out how to attract the people who were actually travelling and pronto (one paraphrases). The good news this week was that there is pent-up demand for luxury travel, as a study from Small Luxury Hotels of the World and Liz Hall Hotel & Travel Consulting found that 38% of affluent clients in North America were ready to fly internationally.
Of those, more than 90% of respondents would seek out a small hotel or private residence while on the road. So still not great for those big, box hotels. The same travellers would also like to see more in the way of flexibility from governments ie not having to be locked up at home when you get back from your holiday. And when your home is not exactly municipal housing with a view of an alleyway, you know the quarantine bit is wearing thin.
But it will take more than that. The global business traveller is not in a rush to come back - in large part because the global business traveller’s boss doesn’t want to pick up the tab if they pick up anything and peg out on the job. Or come back to the office and spread it around. Or merely come back and have to stay at home for a fortnight. Hotels will have to bend to the will of those who will stay and what they want which is, after all, what service was supposed to be in the first place. And what could be so bad about that? So maybe the guest would like a latte at a funny hour, delivered to a functioning workspace while they’re in their PJs. Maybe they’d like to use the gym at 3am. Just don’t get rid of the hash browns.