Interview: Four Seasons CEO on Building a New Kind of Loyalty
Photo Credit: Four Seasons CEO J. Allen Smith. Four Seasons
Skift Take
Four Seasons is at the beginning of its most ambitious growth period yet, and it's looking to both human touch and technology to improve how it delivers a luxury guest experience.
Editor’s Note: Skift is running a series of interviews with hospitality CEOs talking about the Future of the Guest Experience and the evolving expectations and demands of hotel guests. Check out all the interviews as they come out here. This continues our series of CEO interviews, the previous series was on the Future of Booking, with online travel CEOs.
With fewer than 100 properties, Four Seasons as a hotel brand regularly punches above its weight in the crowded hospitality field. It is bulking up though, with 70 openings planned over the next six years. Over the last weekend in October, it opened its largest property, which is the only independent hotel on the Walt Disney World grounds in Orlando, and a new property in Moscow, Russia, which was built on the site of a landmark Soviet property.
CEO J. Allen Smith stepped into his role in September 2013. As hotel CEOs go, he was rather unexpected. Unlike his predecessor, as well as his coun
