Lifestyle Hotel Design

Luxury hotel design, development and operations are jobs for specialists.

The decision by Carlson and Rezidor Hotel Group to sell their luxury Regent International brand to Formosa International Hotels Corp. (FIHC) says a lot about where the luxury hotel sector and high-end hospitality design are headed. It's a clear message that this field is being turned over to experts who understand the high-spend lifestyle. FIHC isn't just thinking about hotels per se. This diversified hospitality/retail giant based in Taiwan is taking a holistic look at fitting Regent into developments plans that include residences, shopping areas, restaurants and other features.

So, if you want to play in the five-star end of resort design and urban hotel design, it's time to dust off your residential and retail skills. But, if volume's the goal, forget the luxe market and start marketing modern hotel design solutions that work mid-tier to upscale. Just think about Carlson's goal of adding 1,500 hotels in those categories within five years, a plan detailed on Hospitality Style.

 

When it comes to luxury travel, is “slow the new fast?” Seymourpowell, a London-based design/innovation company, thinks that could be the case. Hence the firm has created the Aircruise, a giant, vertical airship that would house a luxury hotel and ferry passengers at a leisurely 65-to-90 miles per hour (as compared with the 500-600 mph cruising speed of today’s jet liners).

“The Aircruise concept questions whether the future of luxury travel should be based around space-constrained, resource hungry, and all-too-often stressful airline travel,” says Nick Talbot, Seymourpowell’s design director. “A more serene transport experience will appeal to people looking for a more reflective journey, where the experience of travel itself is more important than getting from A to B quickly. The physics of the airship requires a gigantic volume of lifting gas, yet simultaneously demands a relatively limited amount of weight. This allows for a potentially large amount of space with relatively few people onboard -- a luxury for any traveler."

This is not just some pie-in-the-sky concept in hospitality design trends. The Aircruise idea captured the imagination of Korean giant Samsung Construction and Trading (C&T). Driven by its interest in new materials for building, Samsung C&T hired Seymourpowell to refine the idea and produce a detailed computer animation of the hydrogen-filled, solar-powered airship and its modern hotel design concepts to illustrate this visionary approach to travel of the future. “This was a dream concept project for us, helping to realize a future of sustainable buildings combined with innovative and luxury lifestyle,” said Seung Min Kim, Samsung C&T’s design director at Samsung C&T.





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Maybe I'm just tired of bad news. But at least some of  the indicators coming in from the hotel companies and consulting firms seem to point to a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for hospitality operators and designers.
 

•  Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels' Hotel Investment Outlook 2010 predicts this year's transaction volume will increase by 20 to 40 percent over 2009, the first rise in two years. In dollar figures, that could represent $11 billion to $13 billion worth of hotel purchases in 2010. Fortunately for designers, most of the new owners will be looking at  hotel renovation and/or rebranding and repositioning. The most likely targets for your marketing push, whether for hotel architecture projects or hospitality interiors: Asian conglomerates seeking prime assets in key markets, especially in the U.S. and U.K.; sovereign wealth funds, primarily from the Middle East but also from Asia; public markets, thanks to a new wave of IPOs, rights issues and mortgage and equity real estate investment trusts (REITs).
• Average U.S. occupancy was flat in January, according to Smith Travel Research, but there were bright spots. Markets worth focusing your business development efforts on might include: Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Miami in the U.S. Internationallly, consider Rio de Janeiro; Beijing and Shanghai; major Australian gateways; Berlin, Moscow, Athens, Milan and, not a little surprisingly, Tel Aviv. Occupancy was up 47 percent in January. The Lebanese Tourism Ministry reported a 21 percent uptick in occupancy in 2009 versus 2008.