350 rooms, each with its own identity and subtly different style of service. To accomplish the goal of intimacy, each hotel provides the guests with a dedicated staff and has an ethos and positioning designed to appeal to a specific type of luxury traveler; you could almost call it a“ chooseyour-own-lodging” product. Individual staffing also means that when a guest needs something or has a concern or challenge, they can be helped by someone they already have met face-to-face. Our experience is that service recovery delivered by a familiar onsite team member offers the best scenario for resolving such situations successfully. |
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ADVANTAGES OF SCALE Operating at a larger scale enables delivering an experience that would strain the resources of a smaller hotel. For example, the 400 employees who work our banquet operation have the resources and staffing( what I call“ breathing room”) to do |
The lobby of the Cloister at The Boca Raton.
remarkable things, like bringing in a beekeeper and hive( yes, the bees were safely encased in a glass dome) to provide the freshest honey. I had nothing to do with the decision to do this, or with its delivery, but the guests were delighted.
Scale allows us to also provide mentorship programs, whereby senior staff across the five hotels develop junior talent systematically. It also allows us to hire for specialized roles that smaller properties can’ t justify, such as dedicated concierge teams, full-time sommeliers and in-house floral designers, which guests then benefit from.
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There are financial economies of scale, too, such as procurement savings on the products we order from vendors— everything from napkins to landscaping supplies.
BRINGING IT BACK HOME The risk in getting bigger is that it gets easier to attempt to serve every guest in the same way, leaning on what could erroneously be classified as“ best practices,” since a fundamental concept of luxury is personalization. The luxury market has proven that guests will pay premium rates for personal experiences, which
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is what a well-thought-out approach can provide at scale; you just need to watch out for traditional big-box hotel thinking.
How are we doing on our goals? We now have two Forbes Five-Star ratings for Beach Club and our Spa Palmera and we’ ve been exceeding our owners’ request for 100 % share against our legacy comp set. And we feel comfortable that we will always be exactly the right size for what a particular guest is seeking, with the right human capital providing them the personal experience they are hoping for.
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November 2025 hotelsmag. com 33 |