Sandals Resorts International (SRI), parent company of Sandals Resorts and Beaches Resorts, took home 13 awards at the 30th Annual World Travel Awards Caribbean & The Americas Gala Ceremony on August 26th.
25.08.2023 - 13:49 / skift.com / Anne Hidalgo / Matthew Parsons / Soho House
Hotel brand Zoku is opening its fourth property, which is located in Paris, on May 31.
The upcoming launch reflects the Dutch brand’s slow but steady progress targeting key European hubs. It already runs hotels in Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Vienna.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo next month is expected to officially open the building, which faces the towering Renzo Piano-designed Tribunal de Paris in the Clichy area, and then Zoku’s future hotels may well look different.
That’s because co-founder Hans Meyer is still experimenting. The hotelier — who also co-founded the CitizenM — is on a seemingly endless quest to find out exactly what his guests want. And since the pandemic ended, the future of work is front of mind.
Meyer said he was recently approached by Swedish technology company Mentimeter, as it wanted to book out Zoku’s entire Vienna hotel for 300 employees.
Rather than an annual retreat, Mentimeter calls it a company “relocation.”
In February, Meyer handed over the keys for a whole month.
“Average occupancy levels for hotels in Vienna during the month of February were between 50-60 percent,” said Zoku Marketing Director Elise Hofman. “Zoku Vienna was able to reach almost complete occupancy (96 percent) in February from this buyout.”
The takeover gave Zoku a perfect opportunity to see what kinds of things businesses want from its properties.
“For us it was an interesting learning, we gave them freedom to make the best place out of it, because we want to experiment, to learn: how would you use this entire building as a concept?” Meyer said. “They basically rebuilt the entire place.”
Meyer seems to enjoy this kind of fact-finding. When he was developing the concept for Zoku, he said he built six prototype rooms, compared to the industry standard of one, and evaluated 250 people as test subjects.
“For the last prototype we used mobile EEG (Electroencephalogram) scanning and cameras, so we could measure anxiety and excitement,” he said. “That really helped us finalize everything. From day one we knew it was going to work.”
Zoku took seven years to develop, and the first hotel opened in Amsterdam in 2016.
The key component of Zoku is the loft. This is its basic room, with a double bed tucked away on a mezzanine level, accessible by slide-out stairs.
“In 99 percent of rooms in a city, the bed is the most dominant piece of furniture,” he said. “That’s why you never want to invite somebody into that space. So we’ve hidden the bed, and the kitchen table is paramount. That’s the ID of the Zoku loft, and we do it in the same space as a hotel room.”
Meyer believes that many digital nomads or remote workers, who live and work internationally in a city that they don’t know, and where they don’t speak the language,
Sandals Resorts International (SRI), parent company of Sandals Resorts and Beaches Resorts, took home 13 awards at the 30th Annual World Travel Awards Caribbean & The Americas Gala Ceremony on August 26th.
Accor, the Paris-based hotel giant, said on Tuesday that Omer Acar will head its brands Raffles & Orient Express as of March 1. Acar will join Accor’s other brand CEOs in its luxury and lifestyle group (Fairmont, Sofitel & MGallery, and Ennismore) — all of whom report directly to group CEO Sébastian Bazin.
Good morning from Skift. It’s Wednesday, November 23. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
If you’d thought Silicon Valley’s TripActions was running out of steam as we head towards the year’s end, after its acquisitions and extensive fundraising, think again.
Hotel company Sonesta said on Tuesday it would launch a new brand, Sonesta Essential, and offer a just-added brand, The James, to developers.
“We’re not a WeWork,” the boss of Delta Air Lines’ Sky Clubs once famously said, as the airline began capping the amount of time passengers could stay in its airport lounges.
In some ways the Middle East is a victim of its own success: It weathered the pandemic relatively well, and the luxury market proved resilient. But now as tourism to the region swiftly recovers, the challenge is how do brands operating there stand out when inter-regional competition is so fierce?
Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, December 9. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
Sustainability in travel will no longer simply be judged on stated goals. Rhetoric turns to accountability as companies and destinations are forced to put goals into operations in 2023. Travel climate ambitions have reached a moment of maturity.
Good morning from Skift. It’s Wednesday, January 18. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
Ace Group International, the operator of a buzzy brand of 11 open Ace lifestyle hotels, will be acquired by Sortis Holdings, a Portland, Oregon-based hospitality firm, the companies said on Tuesday.
In full-year 2022, the Loews Hotels chain of 25 luxury properties generated $345 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — a measure of profit — on revenue of $721 million, its parent company reported on Monday.