Skift Take
Early on, Design Hotels narrowed in on the concept that innovative design was the foundation for any good brand experience. The company built on that by promoting the member hotel owners as expert curators of their local neighborhoods.
On April 4 in London, hundreds of the travel industry’s brightest and best will gather in London for the first Skift Forum Europe 2017. In only a few short years Skift's Forums — the largest creative business gatherings in the global travel industry — have become what media, speakers, and attendees have called the “TED Talks of travel.”
This year’s event at Tobacco Dock in London will feature speakers including CEOs and top executives from InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), Norwegian Air, Google, Lonely Planet, Momondo Group, and many more.
The following is part of a series of posts highlighting some of the speakers and touching on issues of concern in Europe and beyond. See the complete list of amazing speakers and topics at this year’s event.
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Design Hotels founder and CEO Claus Sendlinger will be speaking about the independent spirit of his member hotels and their owners at Skift Forum Europe on April 4 in London. We recently spoke with him about the formation of his marketing and distribution platform back in the early 1990s that helped scale a new hotel aesthetic and narrative around it across the hospitality marketplace worldwide.
Before launching Design Hotels, Sendlinger was working in Augsburg, Germany near Munich selling packaged ski tours to the U.S., in collaboration with a business partner based in Sausalito, California. He was also planning events and promoting concerts around Germany where he developed a network of DJs who were driving the rise house/techno music across Europe and the U.S.
Because of his work, Sendlinger was flying between Germany, New York, San Francisco, and Miami on a monthly basis, and his nightclub friends and travel clients were constantly asking for hotel recommendations in those cities. He said it didn't take long before he grasped how trendsetting design was emerging as a new driving force behind the early success of Ian Schrager's ultra-hip Morgans Hotels in New York, Bill Kimpton's European-style Kimpton Hotels in San Francisco, and Chris Blackwell's tropical-chic Island Outpost group in Miami.
At the same time, Sendlinger saw that a growing number of new hotels in various European cities were also experimenting with ambitious design, inspired primarily by the collaboration between Ian Schrager and Philippe Starck who were revolutionizing the hotel guest experience in America.
However, there wasn't an easy wa
