How Alex Calderwood’s Ace Hotel Changed the Way We Travel
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 hot