Marriott and Curator Hotel's Insider Tips on Hosting Blended Travelers
25.08.2023 - 14:24
/ skift.com
/ Sean Oneill
/ Matthew Parsons
Skift unveiled the 2023 edition of its annual Megatrends this week and in the mix, as you’d expect, is the phenomenon of the blended traveler.
Not to be confused with the pre-pandemic “bleisure” traveler, this 2.0 version is more elusive, because they have new needs that hoteliers are still figuring out.
Fortunately during the megatrends reveal in New York, experts joined Skift editors live on stage to dig deeper. They included leaders from Marriott International and Curator Hotel & Resorts.
“Megatrends 2023 are all about how we are traveling differently, so the question for the panel is: how will hotels respond in their design and innovation,” asked Sean O’Neill, Skift’s senior hospitality editor.
For Jennifer Barnwell, president of Curator Hotel & Resort Collection, the focus is on making everything available — because you never know who wants what, and when.
“We’re seeing business travel is different. It’s kind of hard to figure it out, because it used to be easy: whoever is at your hotel Tuesday through Thursday, they’re certainly business travelers, they’ve probably booked meeting space,” she said.
But since the pandemic ended, new patterns have emerged. “But if someone arrives Sunday and stays until Thursday, or arrives Thursday and stays until the next Monday, you don’t always know, and they may not always be booking through their company room,” she added.
In the independent hotel space, in which Curator operates, Barnwell said she was now seeing that new demand.
“We’re seeing the customers have the money to spend, they want to congregate in spaces, they want the food and beverage offerings. We don’t necessarily have a pricing problem, but the services have to be there, and they’ll take advantage of them. You’ve got to make sure your offerings are there.”
This could be more of an operational challenge for smaller independent hotels, to offer facilities round the clock, compared to the likes of Marriott — but Aliya Khan, its vice president of design, argued that travelers know exactly what they want, more than ever, so you’ll never be able to always win.
“You cannot be everything to everyone,” she said. “Get comfortable with that and know that, certainly for us with over 30 brands, if one thing isn’t right for you I promise we’ve got something that is.”
But getting the basics right is really the key, Khan urged. And that includes furniture like desks in the room.
“There was a time when a desk was for one person, now with all this blended travel you might have two adults and child in a hotel room, and somebody’s doing Zoom school, and somebody’s doing something else, so it’s transcended ‘just a desk’ to how do I offer pockets or spaces for more than one person, and then how do you seat them