Hilton has announced Tapestry Collection as its newest brand. It is envisaged to be a brand of boutique-style hotels. All of the big chains have now created new brands for boutique-style or independent hotels or have taken over an existing group of such hotels.
The big chains obviously understand that guests are preferring more and more to stay in individually designed and operated hotels rather than in the branded hotels, which are clones of a fairly emotionless, efficiency-oriented, corporate template.
It is fair to say, I think, that the big hotel groups know they have a serious problem with the hospitality concept of their main corporate brand, which can no longer be concealed. As a result, they are creating new brands around independent hotels and boutique hotels, which are not bound by a mechanistic concept of hospitality. They seem to sense, at last, that the future of hotel hospitality does not lie with the cloning of an old-style, mechanistic, corporate template.
However, by creating a boutique brand, they will most probably be using the same corporate templates to create it, which they use to create the main corporate brand, which is losing its appeal. As they expand, the new boutique brands will then become corporate in nature and they will lose their appeal, thereby leaving the big hotel group corporate office folks back at square one.
They only have one way out of this, and that is to turn all their brands into energetic, spiritual, consciousness-oriented, and Heart-Based hospitality brands. It is pointless to fight it. The death of the mechanistic, corporate hospitality concept is inevitable. The Age of Cloning will then be over, and the spirit and energetic feeling of every hotel will be different. The energetic feeling will become the yardstick. Hotels will then be able to become places of healing and able to meet the emerging emotional, wellbeing, energetic, and healing needs of human beings.
But the corporate offices will resist this option and direction because it will involve so much change. Every SOP will have to be rewritten. Their worldview will have to change. Love, kindness, and compassion will have to become the new focus of hospitality, which they should be anyway, but “love”, “energy”, and “spirituality” are not respectable corporate words.
The sooner the corporate offices can accept that going inwards is the future of hospitality, the sooner hotels can move on to become places of healing, which is their destiny.
