Upper House Luxury Hotel Experience Aims for Custom Approach to Tech and Personalization

Colin Nagy, head of strategy at Fred & Farid, a global advertising agency, writes this opinion column for Skift on hospitality, innovation, and business travel. “On Experience” dissects customer-centric experiences and innovation across hospitality, aviation, and beyond.  The Upper House Hong Kong, the flagship property in the Swire Hotels portfolio, is an example of a hotel that blends technology and human hospitality. It is a model that works, and although it is operating at an elevated luxury level, it points the way in some respects for hotels focused on an intuitive guest experience. But these types of experiences require direction, teamwork, vision and a spirit of continual improvement. To understand the approach at The Upper House Hong Kong, I caught up with the hotel's general manager, Swiss-born Marcel Thoma, an alumni of Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne and hotels such as The Carlyle in New York. Thoma represents a new, progressive generation of hotel gener