Key ingredients for success
The first question to be addressed is: what is a luxury hotel made of?
Today the word luxury has been so overused it’s sometimes quite complicated for the customer to understand what to expect in terms of service and facilities: for example, a five-star hotel in Panama or Hong Kong may differ from one another completely, in terms of quality of service, facilities, pricing, and many other aspects.
And what to say of countries such as France that have altogether different classification systems such as palaces? To make things even more complicated some countries mostly rely on guest comments, while again in France’s example, strict regulations must be followed in order to access a certain level of stars, those are determined by the Minister of Tourism through “Atout France”.[1]
Based on years of observations and numerous interactions with luxury hotel guests, I can safely say that luxury is made of three main components,
- The staff: without their efforts and willingness to please others, there simply can’t be any positive guest experience
- The hotel’s facilities: just like a luxury car is expected to have leather seats and many other quality features, a luxury hotel definitely needs to have certain physical assets that differentiates it from a budget or 3-star hotel
- Clearly defined processes that constantly and consistently exceed customers’ expectations, they are referred to as “standards” in the hospitality industry
Just as in a kitchen recipe, high quality ingredients are necessary to obtain a great result, but the right mix, and perfect execution of the recipe are also key factors for success.
Once the three ingredients are all in place, staff, facilities and processes, the ability to transform these into luxury will greatly depend on the management team in place. Following are detailed descriptions and examples of the three ingredients for success.
[1] France Tourism Development Agency, which promotes the country as a tourist destination. It also oversees the attribution of stars to hotels, following strict regulations
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Next week’s article : Key ingredient #1 : Staff
