What do you find to be the biggest challenge in your role?
I would say staying ahead and innovating in an effective way, when the world is changing all the time.
What is Hilton doing to innovate?
Firstly, we’ve got a big focus on China and we’ve just announced a guest service programme specifically designed for Chinese travellers, called Hilton Huanying – the Chinese word for welcome. We launched this programme in August, at an initial 50 hotels. It provides some guaranteed service elements that Chinese travellers would look for and recognise.
It’s built around three things: arrival, the bedroom and breakfast. On arrival, every participating hotel will have at least one fluent Chinese speaker in their reception team. In the bedroom, there’ll be at least one Chinese TV channel, slippers, a hot water kettle and Chinese tea. And at breakfast there will be some items that Chinese travellers would recognise. We’re doing this because we’re at that tipping point now where China is becoming one of the leading outbound travel destinations in the world, so we’re trying to stay ahead of the trend.
Secondly, spas. For many years we’ve operated spas in our hotels – we have more than 190 in our hotels – but we got to the point a year ago when we realized that we needed our own spa concept. Because so many of our hotels were being built with spas, owners and developers were looking for guidance and our customers were looking for something that was genuinely of high quality. So, we took a year to research and build our own spa concept called Eforea. We’ve opened five already, and we have another 40 in development. It’s about recognising the importance that the spa has in the full-service hotel environment, and that it’s not something we can just leave to local choice. We need to get a high standard.
And thirdly, resorts are becoming a bigger and bigger part of what we do. We have 72 now amongst our 540 hotels. We’ve always had resorts in the business, but we’re now taking a more consolidated approach to making sure that there are some common standards and therefore a more shared marketing approach, so we market them as a dedicated resorts portfolio. We’re opening a lot of new resorts – this year we’ve opened resorts in Turkey, China, New Zealand and Egypt.
Where is Hilton planning to open new hotels?
We try and stay ahead by continuing to pioneer new destinations. Hilton really made its name through the 50s, 60s and 70s by being the first in to international destinations, and that’s still happening today. We’ve opened the first international hotel in Namibia and Equatorial Guinea this year, and later in 2011 we’ll open in Baku in Azerbaijan, our 79th country. It’s important that we keep that Conrad Hilton pioneering culture of bringing international hospitality to the world.
We’ve also opened a new hotel in Manhattan, in the fashion district, which gives us better coverage of New York, plus Chennai and Mumbai in India, Queenstown in New Zealand, Marsa Alam in Egypt, and a second hotel in the Seychelles. We’ve also got a steady stream of openings in China, including our second resort in China.
We’ve got more than 120 hotels in development – our opening pipeline is the largest it’s ever been. The next one in the UK is Heathrow Terminal 5.
What is Hilton planning for the business traveller in its key corporate travel brands?
The whole in-room experience is very important – we’re focusing on technology and smart bedroom design. Bathroom amenities are also important. They need to be of a higher quality, as if you travel for business these days it’s much tougher to carry your own shampoo.
And we’ve got a big focus on food and beverage – it’s as important, or even more important than it’s ever been in how we design hotels. People are having to be so efficient with their time. They’d rather eat quickly and carry on with what they have to do. In the UK and US, we’re also seeing a trend in people wanting small plates to share, which comes from Asia – if you go out to eat there, all food is shared.
How would you summarise Hilton’s design approach?
In framing Hilton’s design approach there are 4 things I feel come together. The first thing is to say we do take a design-led approach, which may sound kind of obvious, but design can be such a long journey. It’s easy to lose track of the design values that you started with, but we make sure things end up looking and feeling really great by keeping a design-led philosophy all the way through. The second things is a customer-focused approach, which means making sure things are functionally relevant. The third thing is reflective of the brand and our brand personality. And the fourth thing is being sympathetic to the region and the location, which is about working with the environment as well as being collaborative with the owners and developers of the property.
How does Hilton maintain a design-led approach?
The way we maintain a design-led approach is first of all we have a dedicated global design team that sits separately to the technical services team, who deal with the more technical functionality of the room and the actual building. We have a team based globally that only thinks about the design, to keep that purity of design thinking.
Customer expectations around design have really risen in recent years. People have come to expect good design from the kettle in the kitchen and the airplane seat they sit in. Great design is not optional any more, it’s absolutely necessary if you’re going to be internationally competitive.
We also have a very extensive list of 2000 globally approved designers from all around the world, everything from architects to restaurant designers, landscape designers, lighting designers. It includes people who we’ve worked with and we know and who can reach the standard we want.
How do you ensure design is customer-focused?
The number one priority for customers in full-service up-scale hotels is the bedroom experience. That’s the core. If you don’t get that right, customers aren’t going to stay with you. What makes the Hilton bedroom work it’s this concept of clean and smart design. Good design makes a room feel cleaner, and a well-lit room feels cleaner.
We did some analysis of guest behavior in bedrooms and looked at how people unpack luggage, where they like to unpack luggage, how they work, where they eat in rooms and how they relax in rooms. So, when designing spaces, desk areas and relaxation areas, the way that they play off each other follows the flow of how a guest uses the space. There is a place in design for rigorous research, it’s not just aesthetic.
How do you ensure that hotel design reinforces the Hilton brand?
When it comes to reflecting the brand, we have a very clear brand personality which we define around five words: authentic, worldly, generous, competent and refreshing. We use these across the board, whether we’re designing an advertising campaign or thinking about how we approach breakfast standards.
If you look in a bedroom space, what does authentic mean? It means avoiding showy design, choosing a design that is real to its environment, materials that are authentic to the environment, and it certainly means easy to use.
Worldly plays out in a couple of ways. There’s a side to worldly that’s about being stylish and sophisticated – you want to feel you’re in an environment where international travellers come, people who’ve seen the world and now what good taste is, but it’s also where being locally sympathetic comes in. It’s a very deep Hilton value. Our founder, Conrad Hilton, when he opened a hotel in Istanbul in the 1950s, he gave a very famous speech and said: “We’re here to bring the world to Istanbul, but more importantly we’re here to bring Istanbul to the world.” He really saw hospitality and travel as a way of bringing the world together, so it’s always been a Hilton way not to have cookie-cutter “a Hilton is a Hilton” approach, but to be sympathetic to a hotel’s situation and environment. Just as an Edwardian property like the Hilton Waldorf in London can be a Hilton, our hotel opening in Heathrow Terminal 5 this year can be a Hilton.
I think the word generous definitely plays out in bedroom design. People need large desks now because everybody works in their room – technology makes it so easy to do. People also want a good-sized bed. And generally we have to be clever with space – people are buying space and we want to give them as much usable space as possible.
One of the things people come to Hilton for is competence – there’s a theme that at Hilton things are going to work, so bedroom and maintenance standards need to be very high, and the equipment we install in bedrooms needs to be easy to maintain and reliable – not some gadget that looks great but within three months is already starting to fail.
Refreshing is about surprise and delight – coming into a room and seeing something you may not have seen before, such as a nice piece of art, or something that gives you a positive feeling.
How do you balance being innovative with design and playing it safe
Well, we definitely believe in classic and timeless designs. There are certain design styles that have a sustained appeal. We do get design schemes submitted where, say, someone wants to do the washstand in orange, and while it may feel like a good idea today, you’ll look at it in two years’ time and hate it, so we steer away from very fashion-led or fad-led design and go more for classic, authentic themes. It’s about what works and feels authentic in the environment.
The range of Hiltons is tremendous. We’re not about being predictable, in fact quite the opposite. We want people to feel something. With Hilton I think there’s a balance where people want to feel uplifted but also reassured. Part of the reason people come to a Hilton is because there’s a dependency about it – they know they’ll be looked after and that things will work. It means there needs to be some familiarity, a consistency that people can depend upon. For example, our beds. Our standard is for an all-white bed, without lots of throw cushions that end up spending most of the time on the floor. We just want to have a classic all-white bed, that’s central to the room design. The colour scheme might differ, and the artwork and furniture may, but we don’t mess with the bed.
What trends do you see happening in hotel design?
A return to the sense that design should deliver an experience that is in some way better than home, especially in bathrooms. I think people look for bathrooms that have memorable elements they’ve not seen before, and that’s more now than just a rainshower head.
Some example of features that are appearing in some of our hotels are radiant heat floor systems, large walk-in showers with benches in them, pebble-flooring in showers, teak benches, illuminated mirrors with in-built lighting and integrated televisions, highly universal power outlets so you don’t need an adaptor and soft-close toilet seats (on a controlled hinge).
If you go to Asia, particularly Japan, toilet technology is a whole subject of its own! One of the things we aim to look at, because we’re in 78 countries, is what are things we’re experiencing in one part of the world that will start to have an appeal in others. Asia is definitely the heartland of toilet technology – so it’s great to import some of that and add and element of surprise and delight! When you get it, it’s a nice touch.