A Luxury Collection Insider Shares The One Hotel You Must Visit

25.03.2024 - 13:35 / forbes.com

The Luxury Collection spans more than 120 hotels in 35-plus countries, and the brand has ambitious plans for this year. It will open more than 10 new properties everywhere from Barbados to Patmos, Greece.

To learn more about the upcoming new hotels, we talked to Philipp Weghmann, vice president and global brand leader for The Luxury Collection. He revealed plans for the company that go beyond hotels, where to go this summer and the one Luxury Collection hotel you must visit.

How do you differentiate The Luxury Collection from other Marriott luxury brands, like The Ritz-Carlton or St. Regis?

Two of our closest sister brands are, indeed, Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis. These are hard brands, and The Luxury Collection is a soft brand, a collection brand. That’s the main difference. The Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis these days all look different, from a design and an experience perspective. But there are things that you will find in every Ritz-Carlton, like a Ritz-Carlton lounge, a Ritz-Carlton club lounge or a Ritz-Carlton kids club. And The St. Regis will have a few of those things carrying through globally.

We don’t really have that with Luxury Collection. We want every hotel to be unique, one of a kind and deeply rooted in the destination that it sits in. That then leads us to different products in terms of the design, architecture and everything that’s in the hotel, from food and beverage to wellness. There’s no such thing as a Luxury Collection spa. Each hotel has its own take on that. Sometimes it’s their own concept. Sometimes it’s with an outside partner, but it will always have a connection to the destination. And the same with the food and beverage. If it’s a larger hotel, it could have multiple outlets, but at least one of the restaurants will be an interpretation of local cuisine.

What is in store for the brand in the future?

For other luxury brands, sometimes it’s very specific what they’re looking for: 50 rooms in so and so location, or no more than 120 rooms. The Luxury Collection has broad shoulders. We can go very small, we can go a little bigger and we can definitely leave this traditional city and resort space that most hotel brands are made of.

I think we can go into adjacent spaces quite a bit with this brand looking into the future and extend into experiences of other non-hotel accommodations. I’m thinking yachts, river cruises, trains, certainly safari lodges and other tented camps. That’s one area where the brand is going to grow in the years to come because it just has this wonderful and flexible positioning that allows us to bring them in and still be very true to our brand philosophy.

Secondly, strategic growth. We just opened [Sanasaryan Han, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Istanbul]