Skift Take
W Hotels, St. Regis Hotels and Starwood Luxury Collection anticipated the changing behaviors and demographics of the luxury consumer, and adapted their business models and content marketing strategies around them, before much of the rest of the hospitality industry.
The hotel luxury sector is undergoing seismic shifts in terms of product development, service culture and brand communications, driven by new emerging source markets and a broader diversity of luxury travelers than ever before.
Few people have a better understanding of those shifts than Starwood Hotels’ Paul James, global brand leader for W Hotels, St. Regis Hotels, and the Starwood Luxury Collection. Because he oversees three diverse brands—all catering to upscale clientele but with vastly different deliveries—we reached out to him for an industry update on luxury travel trends in 2014.
In 2008, James says Starwood’s top brass gathered to discuss the future of luxury hospitality and the brand’s role in it. Part of that was inspired by the rapid success of W Hotels, which since its inception had attracted a higher guest economic bracket than originally anticipated.
For everyone in those 2008 meetings, it was clearly evident that the 21st century, high-worth traveler did not look, act or purchase travel like previous generations. These new luxury seekers were younger, design savvy, tech dependent, more global, and a lot of them were women. Most important, especially among Westerners, they dismissed traditional rules of formality.
A conscious decision was made to bump W Hotels up into the luxury space because its average daily rate in high-demand markets was sometimes approaching those for the Luxury Collection and St. Regis. When it opened in 2009, the all-suite W South Beach became the brand’s flagship and signaled W Hotels’ entrance into the true luxury segment.
“The journey of luxury hospitality has been moving very rapidly over the last five years,” says James. “It's this shift from classic, product-led luxury to individual, personalized and experience-led luxury. And I think as we've seen new markets open up to luxury, they're opening up to this new form of luxury, so that's speeding up the process even quicker.”
St. Regis and Luxury Collection, meanwhile, were firmly established among the top tiers of hospitality in 2008. But again drawing inspiration from W’s playbook, both brands developed new online content marketing programs and on-property programming to provide material for similar brand storytelling and lifestyle messaging.
For example, the sublime 15-minute film “Here” produced for the Luxury Collection in 2012 depicts a young woman played by supermodel Agyness Deyn following the invites of an
