Skift Take
With hyperlocal travel the biggest trend in tourism, hotels are looking outward for community partners to provide authentic, insider cultural experiences.
Hyatt Hotels launched its Andaz brand in London with the 267-room Andaz Liverpool Street six years ago. Today there are nine Andaz hotels positioned as “upscale, boutique-inspired lifestyle properties that distill the best of their locale.”
I visited Andaz Wall Street during its first month in operation in 2010. There was no registration desk in the lobby. There was no bar in the bar. Instead, you checked in with a host seated on a David Rockwell-designed sofa. In the bar, the bartenders poured drinks at your table. The intent was to remove any separation between employees and guests to create a new social hotel of the future.
Since then, Andaz has built on its mission of human connectivity by bringing local emerging artists together with area residents and hotel guests during monthly “Andaz Salon” parties themed around food, music, art and fashion. They were inspired by the classic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Paris Salons, once the center of the literary universe, where the social elite gathered to discuss Molière, the F
