Cultivating an Authentic Experience
Catering to guests who are primarily concerned with the authenticity of their experiences involves careful planning on the part of hoteliers to ensure that a property’s packages are up to snuff. There are many ways to do this, including partnering with local tourism boards, employing people familiar with the surrounding town, and speaking to locals about the best area attractions.
Tourism boards in particular can be an excellent way to ensure that key attractions are incorporated into a hotel’s packages and overall identity. “The tourism boards are very keyed into what makes a particular city special,” Vaughan says. “And as we build up the programs for each of our properties, it’s essential that we know what businesses and attractions we should feature.” Harper adds that tourism boards help paint a more complete picture of a city’s core identity. “We’re not just looking for the traditional travel guides and most obvious tourist spots. Working with tourism boards helps us to give guests a more nuanced experience,” he explains.
Even with all carefully cultivated packages, it’s still extremely important for hotels looking to capture experience-seeking travelers to have the staff in place on a day-to-day basis to help guests during their visits. The concierges at these properties should be extremely well-versed in the surrounding areas, and able to provide many different suggestions for a wide breadth of guests. “When I’m visiting a hotel that is looking to join the Curio collection, I’ll often go up to the concierge and play the tourist. I’ll say something like, ‘I’ve only got an hour to spare, what would you do if you had an hour?’ You never want that concierge to be stumped,” Vaughan says. “It’s a natural extension of selling your property to also be selling the area around it and all it has to offer.”
Getting to know the guests is also imperative, as one person’s “authentic” experience may be different from another’s. “There are people who want to eat street food in the park and people who want a gourmet restaurant experience,” Harper notes. “Neither of these approaches is less ‘authentic’ than the other, and you should be prepared to accommodate both.”
Community Gains
A good indicator of whether a hotel is delivering an authentic experience would be to measure its community footprint. Do locals frequent the bar? Do neighborhood musical acts perform at the restaurant? “If you’re a guest and you walk into the hotel restaurant and see a mix of locals and other travelers, you know you’ve found a place that fits in well with its community and you feel like you’re getting the best of the town because locals are a part of it,” Robinson explains.
When a hotel is successful in building a package that would attract experience-focused travelers, the net effect of these efforts will often be that the property will have a profound buoying affect on the local economies. “If you’re an independent or soft-branded hotel specializing in authentic experiences, you’re not going to send someone who’s looking for a coffee to the Starbucks; you’re going to send her to that great cafe down the street that sources its beans from Colombia,” Vaughan says.
Additionally, when a local establishment partners with a hotel for a package, it becomes a way for them to communicate who they are and what they do with an audience outside of their typical clientele and drum up new business. “Imagine the sort of social media storm that will surround the first person to get a tattoo using Metropolitan at the 9’s tattoo package,” Robinson says. “That is advertising for both the tattoo parlor and the hotel that money can’t buy, and it will attract more business for both locations.”
And that’s what it all comes back to—having an authentic travel experience that can be Facebooked and Instragrammed for the greatest social currency return. #Authentic is the new motto of luxury travel.
Photo courtesy of The Diplomat Resort & Spa
