Don’t mention the M word: travel habits are about Lifestyle

Recently I stayed in a category of hotels that aim to re-define the convenience / consistency / perks driven experience that dominates mainstream travel with a highly individualised one, and which have increasingly sprung up across all regions to cater for the supposedly ‘new’ generation of travelers.

Upon arrival I was ushered by a friendly girl in sneakers to a self-check in terminal. At the restaurant I found a mishmash of cosy sofas and dining tables and the menu came on an iPad. The room was a loft room with separate lounge and sleeping areas. You know by now that I am talking about a hotel that is from the outset targeted at the so called Millennial generation. The experience was awful, but before I go into the details why, let’s get a clearer idea of this much overused category: the Millennial traveller.

Shock, horror - Millennials are not as
different as previous generations

The Millennial Myth demystified

After a flurry of breathless predictions over the past years on Millennials’ uniqueness in shaping every part of our lives, most industries and commentators have now realised that Gen-Yers are – shock, horror - not quite as different than previous generations. A recent US centric study on this that can be found here shows that it is more the times we live in, rather than generations themselves that have shaped behaviour. People respond to the changes around them and according to the report, any differences in travel behaviour between Millennials and previous generations have more to do with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis than with dramatic shifts in attitudes and as such are likely to be evened out as Millennials mature.

The ascendancy of the Lifestyle brand

If we take the Millennials out of the equation, what we are left with is essentially ‘Lifestyle’, which as a travel category has been on the ascendancy for quite a while. It seems that we have mistaken the Millennials’ sheer power of numbers with our changing habits and preferences, which are in fact inter-generational.

The first W hotel in New York

We all like a little more personalisation and special experience when we travel – who wants to stay in a hotel room that is totally interchangeable with the one in the hotel next door if you can avoid it? It seems to me that what used to be called a boutique hotel, which was by nature geared towards attracting a niche, has now become a lifestyle hotel.

A quick check into the history of hotel brands shows this very well. Ian Schrager, often referred to as single-handedly creating the boutique hotel genre, saw the emergence of a more individualistic trend in travel three decades ago. And the original “Lifestyle” hotel brand, W Hotels, was created as far back as 1998, a time when the term Millennials wasn’t even coined, mobile phones looked like bricks and AltaVista reigned as the Internet search engine of choice.

The newer brands in this category such as Moxy, Aloft, Tribute, VIB and the likes are the W’s of our times and share the corresponding design principles pioneered all those years ago, namely high-tech amenities, communal spaces, as well as an emphasis on the experiential and wellness. These are all attributes that I respond to as well, and I am certainly not a Y’er. They may all look kind of bland and same-ish, but as long as what they do is well executed these hotel brands should do well in any demographic. 

The fundamentals of guest experience have not changed

Which brings me back to my experience at the hotel I mentioned at the start.

Hipster aesthetic:
bland and same-ish

What appears to have gone wrong there was that the owners/developers wanted to quickly jump on the Millennial bandwagon without doing the home work. If what we are seeing today is the emergence of lifestyle brands, not Millennial brands, it is an obvious conclusion that the fundamentals should not have changed either, such as good customer service and guest experience.

Is there room for improvement in the check in process? Absolutely. But just slapping a check in kiosk in the lobby and letting the guest do all the tedious work of typing in address details (as opposed to being able to hand front end staff my business card so they can do it later) translates into a terrible guest experience. That this part can be handled much better has been proven by early adopters in the lifestyle category such as CitizenM, that engage the guest early and thus have a complete picture at check in that requires just a few steps by the guests themselves in order to walk away with the room key.

And just to complete my list of complaints at that hotel: if you do go to the length of having an iPad for ordering in the restaurant, make sure that it actually is doing what it is supposed to do. Handing me the tablet and warning me to ‘check the order with the server before placing it’ translates into a very expensive exercise in futility.

Last not least, just giving the appearance of ticking all the right boxes with a contemporary design and ‘communal spaces’ is simply not enough. A loft room may be cool and contemporary, but if it is not equipped with enough power points and/or USB charging stations frustration will set in very quickly. And only allowing me to access WiFi with two devices when I need access for 3 (the average is 3.6 today and 4.3 by 2020) will make sure this hotel will disappear from my favourites list forever.

Facebook and the $100 Billion Dollar Question

There seemed to be a collective breath holding going earlier this week when it was reported that Facebook is apparently planning an IPO in the first half of next year to the tune of $10 billion, which would value the company a cool $100 billion. If successful, it would also be the largest tech IPO in history, but merely the fourth largest ever; still not bad for a company that wasn’t even around 8 years ago. 

Some of the reports couldn’t resist the “Dr Evil” reference, that line in the first Austin Powers movie where the numeracy challenged Dr Evil proposes to hold the world ransom for $100 billion. However, compared with the amounts that we are bombarded with on a regular basis these days, a mere $100 billion seems like a piggy bank of small change. Greece is threatening to buckle under a 340 billion Euro debt, the US government bailing out the financial community to the tune of $700 billion in 2008, and of course now facing a $15 trillion deficit as at November 17, 2011 (take that Dr Evil!). These types of numbers seem to be rolling off everyone’s tongue as if discussing the latest petrol prices. While many lay people may still gasp in awe at the likely Facebook valuation, my guess is that very few are able to take it beyond its abstract meaning of “a whole lot of money”. 

So let’s just quickly clarify what we are actually dealing with. Wallstats.com puts the cost of waging 48 hours of war in Iraq and Afghanistan at one billion dollars, which puts the $15 trillion US-deficit somewhat in perspective. The site usdebt.kleptocracy.us on the other hand, does a great visualization of various astronomic amounts, of which the One Billion Dollar one looks like this:

So now that we have established beyond doubt that we are talking about more money than you can reasonably carry away in a bank robbery, let’s go back to Dr Evil and look at the ransom part. There is actually a bit of irony in there that I find much more irresistible than the dollar amount itself. 

The vast amount of intimate information Facebook now has available about its users worldwide is such that if it was a government agency, it would pose an internal security risk for any country that has a sizeable Facebook user community (which excludes, notably, China). So with vast amounts of sensitive intelligence and deep pockets, you may indeed be forgiven to think that there is something slightly creepy going on. But maybe that’s because (disclosure) I don’t do Facebook. 

The notion that you give your personal data (and then some) voluntarily over to a commercial corporation, whose intentions about what it plans to do with it are less than clear, and then go out to buy into the company once it goes IPO sounds almost like buying back what you have given for free. But who knows, maybe Facebook won’t get the $10 billion IPO, or even if, maybe it won’t hold its value after the launch which in the current economic climate is quite possible. Just this week it was reported that companies that listed in the US this year had lost an average of 10% of their value after debuting. And that includes coupon-seller Groupon, whose shares have now fallen below their initial price, as well as music streaming site Pandora Media.

There will no doubt be a great deal of analysis and debate about whether Facebook is actually worth $100 billion. But whichever way it goes, the IPO (if it is true) sends a powerful signal to the industry. It implies that the company, just like other entertainment and communications technology companies is  poised to continue to thrive, no matter whether there’s a deadlock in the Senate or the Eurozone breaks up. Quite to the contrary. It seems that the more dire the circumstances, the more we collectively flee into the haven of entertainment, even if it is just for a short while. The record 42 billion online videos watched by US citizens in October this year speak for themselves, and so do the reports that despite the general doom and gloom telcos are set to profit from stable growth in the coming years.  On the whole, it looks like it’s statistically proven that we love to be entertained when we are happy and we also spend money to be entertained when we are sad.

Of course, as the entertainment sector bucks the trend and becomes the shining example of successin an otherwise faltering economy, things will get a lot more competitive for a share of the spoils.  Many other operators, currently on the industry fringes may just muscle their way in. For companies already in the entertainment and communications technology space this means just one thing: innovate or perish.