SPECIAL REPORT
ADAPTING TO
NEW RULES
FOR WORK , PLAY
With a great experience becoming the new measure of success , hoteliers are reinventing public spaces to become more accessible and training staff to interact in a less scripted and more authentic , personal way . HOTELS asked the panel how they are responding to new guest expectations .
HOTELS : What are you doing to more effectively compete with any number of disruptors , and how much will the co-working concept impact your plans ? Brad Wilson : Experience is the key , right ? And that ’ s what has actually moved the industry over the last several years . Whether it be reinventing a lobby or reinventing restaurants and what they mean in hotels . Co-working is the logical next extension experience . It makes perfect sense to combine it with a hotel to reinvent how that location and work environment come together … Picture co-working with rooms in Tulum – so if I work from home , I just go there , I plug in , I have my own office all the time , but I live in my little bungalow on the beach . So it ’ s the idea of co-working and how it makes access to experiences even bigger …
Sharan Pasricha : Our view is where you stay today says so much more about who you are than it did 10 years ago . So travelers are a lot more conscious about the decisions they make about where they stay , especially in the social digital age . There is a convergence of the lobby morphing into co-working , morphing into F & B , morphing into meeting spaces . I think this is a time for hotels like ours to get ahead of the game and think that through .
Danny Hughes : The co-working trend is changing design … Traditional programming is evolving , reactivating and reenergizing public spaces . They are not just somewhere to go and have a drink now . So we ’ re actually looking at all the programming , and it ’ s helped us evolve , to find these zones that can be multi-use throughout the day .
Avi Brosh : From my own personal experience exploring integrating co-working into a platform , although at 30,000 feet it sounds like it ’ s the hospitality business , it ’ s fundamentally a completely different business than lodging . To do it in earnest you either have to integrate an existing platform into your platform , or if you want to do it yourself , there is a learning curve . It is really challenging for a lodging company to set up … We ’ ve explored it and when we were fairly down the road we ended up jettisoning it because it just really wasn ’ t congruent with growing the lodging business and the brand .
Pasricha : We ’ ve been running a co-working business for 10 years and we just haven ’ t charged people for it . It ’ s in our lobbies … So we ’ ve now decided to launch a co-working brand within a hotel . We have 1,000 desks ( about 60,000 square feet , or 20 % -25 % of the hotel space ) and it ’ ll be membership-based …. We ’ re having fun thinking about desk service , like you would think
WE ' VE BEEN RUNNING A CO-WORKING BUSINESS FOR 10 YEARS AND WE JUST HAVEN ' T CHARGED PEOPLE FOR IT . IT ' S IN OUR LOBBIES .
SHARAN PASRICHA
24 hotelsmag . com May 2019