How Alex Calderwood's Ace Hotel Changed the Way We Travel
Photo Credit: Alex Calderwood, co-founder of Ace Hotel. Ace Hotel
Skift Take
Alex Calderwood grew Ace Hotel into a global phenomenon by first understanding the emerging Gen X market in Seattle during the 1990s.
With so much discussion in the travel industry focused on Boomers versus Millennials, the Gen X crowd in the middle always gets overlooked.
For those of us born roughly between 1965-80, our biggest contribution to society was being the pivot between the age of reason and age of irony. We didn’t know what the big answers were back in the 1980s-'90s, but we knew it wasn’t misplaced loyalty to a rapidly globalizing corporate America.
People called us “slackers.” We invented the reply “Whatever.” Looking back, we were trying to deconstruct life in the 20th century by refusing traditional notions of status and success. Kurt Cobain and the Seattle grunge scene became our new ideological compass, and the temporal nature of the times—a feeling that nothing could be relied upon or fully trusted—compelled a new generation to question everything.
Ace Hotel is an entirely Gen X phenomenon because it deconstructed the traditional urban hotel model with the launch of Ace Hotel Seattle in 1999. Most of what we consider Millennial trends in hospitality today, placing a priority on personalized, local and authentic travel experiences, began with Gen X and a handful of innovative hotel groups like Ace.
During the early '90s, Ace Hotel founder Alex Calderwood was living in the thick of Seattle's booming grunge scene, working as a music promoter and vintage clothing seller. He passed away last month at the age of 47. Since then, the amount of social media attention is unprecedented for a hotel owner, especially one with only five hotels. Why is that?
Calderwood didn’t regard himself as a hotelier. He viewed himself more as an entrepreneur and "cultural engineer," dating back to his club gigs in gritty Seattle bars, which eventually evolved into hosting upscale parties for Nike and Microsoft. The admiration for Calderwood stems from his ability to engage with and inspire people from all different social backgrounds and economic classes. The world also always loves an underdog with big ideas, a wi
