Pendry Wants to Blur the Lines Between Boutique and Luxury in Hotels
Photo Credit: A bar in a Pendry hotel Pendy
Skift Take
Pendry has built an interesting boutique-feeling brand on top of actual luxury knowledge and operations. The result is something differentiated in the market and worth keeping an eye on.
On Experience
Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.Despite all of the flood of new brands proliferating in the hospitality space, a sizable gulf still exists between the land of the boutique and the land of luxury. Boutiques often push a very compelling sell, but fall short when it comes to the soft skills: anticipation, creature comforts, and true attention to detail. My litmus test is to call and ask if the property does turndown or keeps a keen eye on how the arrival occurs — canaries in the coal mine to determine the level of service and detail at a property.
The boutique landscape, originally homespun in the eras of great hoteliers like Ian Schrager and Liz Lambert, has scaled into something more mass-produced and focus-grouped from larger hospitality groups. And lines between luxury and boutique don’t often intersect as much as I would like. But this is starting to change.
Enter Pendry, a boutique brand built off of the luxury savoir-faire from its parent brand, Montage, founded by Alan Fuerstman, almost 20 years ago. Though you might not have noticed during the curtailment of travel in the pandemic, Pendry has been quietly building up an interesting footprint within urban centers, where it is bringing a younger, fresher, art-centric approach while also not losing touch with where it came from — one of the most storied names in high-end hospitality.
The brand's portfolio spans West Hollywood, Baltimore, San Diego as well as a newly launched property in
