Skift Take
Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts' approach to the luxury market is a little bit different from its peers, and our conversation with president and CEO J. Allen Smith gives you a bit of a glimpse into that approach.
The day before another hotelier was elected to the highest office in the U.S., Skift traveled north to Toronto to meet with Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts president and CEO J. Allen Smith to talk about the challenges facing the luxury hotel market, and what lies ahead for the future of hospitality.
More than three years into his role as president and CEO of the storied luxury hotel company, Smith has endeavored to grow the Four Seasons brand with a uniquely singular focus on differentiating the Four Seasons brand within the luxury market.
When Smith joined, the company had less than 100 properties and today, it has 101 in 42 countries worldwide, with more than 50 projects in development. In the years since his appointment, Four Seasons also launched the Four Seasons Private Jet and the Four Seasons mobile app. The company's latest development is a Research and Discovery Studio, of which Skift got a firsthand tour during our visit.
What follows is an edited version of our interview with Smith.
Skift: Are you paying a lot of attention to what's happening with Brexit or the U.S. Presidential election?
Allen: I would say yes, we of course pay attention to those things. I think part of it, again, is you ask yourself what can I do about it. I can vote, so I've done that already. In the U.S., I think, right now where you see it, the short-term impact, in terms of the election just seems to have caused any number of people to take a pause, to figure out what's going to happen. What are we going to be faced with come tomorrow night?
Regardless of who's in office, if you think about the U.S. it's an incredibly important market to us because of the size of our portfolio in the United States but also because the United States is the single largest source of room night demand for us globally. It's a very important market for us in that regard so therefore among the most critical for us is how the economy is going to do.
Right now, as we come to the precipice of this election, the economy is generally okay. I know there has been a lot of partisan bickering about what the state of it really is but the most recent jobs report was generally favorable, and unemployment is reported to be around 4.9 percent, which is pretty low. Growth is predicted to be between 2 to 3 percent for the foreseeable future and so that's a prescription that is generally OK for us in the U.S.
The other piece is the economy needs to continue to be favorable. That's a big
