Apply, and pass a punchlist to show that you meet their standards, as your hotel would with any franchise organization.
That's all The Leading Hotels of the World is, a 'consortium', a membership organization, like Best Western.
As to anything more specific, you'd have to ask them. I can't speak for them and since, I suspect, many of the 'standards' at that luxury tier are subjective and will even vary by property, I wouldn't dare try.
My only qualification to answer this question at all is that I've actually stayed in one: a few years back, the Hotel Bethlehem in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was an LHW. I still have a copy of the printed directory in which they appeared.
The Hotel Bethlehem is really nice. I wasn't served tea, so I can't speak to the 'requirements' for how they do it (nor anything else about the service - I'm sure bell service was available, but I only had one bag that I didn't mind schlepping up to the room myself). Indeed, I used to live in Bethlehem and I love that hotel, both for all the usual reasons, and because I used to work for the company that almost bought it (with yours truly putting a flea in their ear, coming up with the idea and egging them on and encouraging them) when its owners went into bankruptcy in 1998 and the opportunity came up for us to buy it, renovate it, and for me to be the project manager (an opportunity to bring a unique set of skills into play, since my degree is in architectural technology, not a hospitality field) and carry on afterward as the g.m. of a high-profile, well-regarded property (not bad for a guy whose first job in a hotel was as a night auditor in a run-down hotel owned by a criminal organization).
I would characterize it as luxury tier -- and at that level, much depends on intangibles. In not only the Hotel Bethlehem, but nearly all luxury hotels which I have either visited or worked, the rooms aren't that much better - if at all - than those you'd find at any Holiday Inn Express, Hampton Inn or Courtyard. They may have one or two extra features, be a little more plush, have a down comforter rather than a foam comforter or sheets with a lower thread count, and more fluffy towels. There is more attention to detail, but I don't think that surpasses what you'd find at any Class A property. You can still see little flaws and human error if you know where to look.
The appeal of luxury tier is the intangibles, and how both the facility (including the room) and the experience of staying there add up to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If you now operate a successful luxury hotel, you already get that. So, if you own a hotel and you want to try for an LHW affiliation, have at it. I'm sure I'd be in for a few surprises, but still, I wouldn't be intimidated by the requirements.
Many shopping malls, as they age, come to be owned by real estate investors who should not own malls -- and their subsequent decline and fall isn't so much a downward spiral as it is a near-vertical crash and burn. (I've even seen it happen to well-run, 'good' malls, because a bigger mall, with more room for more stores and more creature features, opened not too far away, rendering it instantly obsolete.) There's a very successful website, DeadMalls.com, dedicated to such malls. Like a hotel, it's not a passive real estate investment. It takes a high skill level, a very light touch, and an ability to connect with others that transcends even that required for running a mid-market hotel, to manage one successfully.
You don't just fit up the space, lease it out to whoever shows up and shows an interest, and collect the rent: a mall is not a strip shopping center. You or I could probably manage a strip center successfully. If I owned a mall (and believe me, I wouldn't), even I would contract the management of it to people who knew what they were doing, and that I had checked out, and who could be counted on to do it successfully.
You need to have the right tenant mix. You have to have shops that appeal to and connect with well-to-do retail customers and draw them to the mall. You might turn away a potentially lucrative tenant that wouldn't fit in with the other tenants: you might take more of a chance with one that may be a bit more financially speculative but will draw in customers who'll spend lots of money - and hang around the mall and browse while they're there -- and you still have to operate it profitably. (Arguably, the late South Square Mall in Durham, N. C., one that I really liked when I lived there, was done in for lack of a bookstore. It's just one guy's reason for not visiting it too frequently, but something like that does draw people with money who'll hang out for awhile and browse. And you don't have to be too much of a commercial real estate expert to know that the rent paid by big anchor stores, and movie theaters that are part of a mall, barely pays for the space they take up, if even that -- they're there because they draw people to the mall.)
You can't let the facility sit: you're constantly renovating and redecorating -- you have to connect with and appeal to those well-heeled shoppers, and know what they want, and one thing they don't want is to visit a mall that they're getting tired of looking at. You want your space to be constantly evolving.
You'll have to book and stage events that will draw people - the right kind of people. (Who are the 'right' people? That's another delicate balancing act, out of many. For example, teenagers: everyone's biggest worry about malls is the discomfort of teenagers hanging out, and having to worry about what they'll do. Yet, the average teenager is going to show up with about forty to fifty bucks in his pocket - and can spend every penny of it without having to worry about other bills. Management is not going to lightly make a decision about having the security guards shoo that amount of money out of the mall for 'loitering' or 'congregating'. And I've seen more than one mall demand that the local city transit authority remove its bus stop from in front of its property, because no one that came in on the city bus was worth the riff-raff that the mall management and merchants felt that the bus brought in from the wrong parts of town.)
Everything about managing a successful shopping mall is a delicate balancing act. (Most of what I know about mall management comes from a single chapter in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (Anchor Books)) The experience of visiting the mall, for everyone who shows up, is as important as the bricks and mortar, and the stores' inventories.
When I lived in Pennsylvania, I dated a woman who liked upscale eating establishments. I didn't mind, as long as it was once in awhile as a treat, not every time we went out. Here again - the food wasn't that much better: if anything, the portions were smaller and you didn't get as much of it. It was the ambience that you were paying the premium for. Achieving that, and putting it and keeping it in place, requires a high level of skill and the ability to connect -- and the ability to keep what you do connected -- with people who don't mind paying thirty to fifty bucks for a dinner check. It isn't just 'service' and 'making the customer feel welcome' (you can try that in a much more modest establishment and still never have people who don't mind paying thirty to fifty bucks for a dinner check show up -- or be willing to pay more than fifteen bucks for a meal if they do), any more than it's just the expensive cut of meat and the garnish and the presentation, etc., or just the upscale decor in the dining room. It's the sum total of the experience, the synergy, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. She got a lot more out of it than I did - and she could probably do a better job of running a luxury hotel or a shopping mall than I, or that part of it, anyway (she had been a hotel director of sales for several years). I and my company would be better off to stick to select service properties.
Running a hotel at the luxury tier is very much a series of this type of delicate balancing act that is involved in running a successful shopping mall or upscale restaurant. It's more than having the bricks and mortar in place, and having it all work, and even the attention to detail and the more plush sheets and terry. These have to be in place, but in the end, it's the overall ambience and guest experience -- the ability to connect, and to generate what will connect, with people who don't mind paying three to five hundred dollars per night for a hotel room for several nights -- that will count.
Originally appeared on Quora
That's all The Leading Hotels of the World is, a 'consortium', a membership organization, like Best Western.
As to anything more specific, you'd have to ask them. I can't speak for them and since, I suspect, many of the 'standards' at that luxury tier are subjective and will even vary by property, I wouldn't dare try.
My only qualification to answer this question at all is that I've actually stayed in one: a few years back, the Hotel Bethlehem in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was an LHW. I still have a copy of the printed directory in which they appeared.
The Hotel Bethlehem is really nice. I wasn't served tea, so I can't speak to the 'requirements' for how they do it (nor anything else about the service - I'm sure bell service was available, but I only had one bag that I didn't mind schlepping up to the room myself). Indeed, I used to live in Bethlehem and I love that hotel, both for all the usual reasons, and because I used to work for the company that almost bought it (with yours truly putting a flea in their ear, coming up with the idea and egging them on and encouraging them) when its owners went into bankruptcy in 1998 and the opportunity came up for us to buy it, renovate it, and for me to be the project manager (an opportunity to bring a unique set of skills into play, since my degree is in architectural technology, not a hospitality field) and carry on afterward as the g.m. of a high-profile, well-regarded property (not bad for a guy whose first job in a hotel was as a night auditor in a run-down hotel owned by a criminal organization).
I would characterize it as luxury tier -- and at that level, much depends on intangibles. In not only the Hotel Bethlehem, but nearly all luxury hotels which I have either visited or worked, the rooms aren't that much better - if at all - than those you'd find at any Holiday Inn Express, Hampton Inn or Courtyard. They may have one or two extra features, be a little more plush, have a down comforter rather than a foam comforter or sheets with a lower thread count, and more fluffy towels. There is more attention to detail, but I don't think that surpasses what you'd find at any Class A property. You can still see little flaws and human error if you know where to look.
The appeal of luxury tier is the intangibles, and how both the facility (including the room) and the experience of staying there add up to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If you now operate a successful luxury hotel, you already get that. So, if you own a hotel and you want to try for an LHW affiliation, have at it. I'm sure I'd be in for a few surprises, but still, I wouldn't be intimidated by the requirements.
Many shopping malls, as they age, come to be owned by real estate investors who should not own malls -- and their subsequent decline and fall isn't so much a downward spiral as it is a near-vertical crash and burn. (I've even seen it happen to well-run, 'good' malls, because a bigger mall, with more room for more stores and more creature features, opened not too far away, rendering it instantly obsolete.) There's a very successful website, DeadMalls.com, dedicated to such malls. Like a hotel, it's not a passive real estate investment. It takes a high skill level, a very light touch, and an ability to connect with others that transcends even that required for running a mid-market hotel, to manage one successfully.
You don't just fit up the space, lease it out to whoever shows up and shows an interest, and collect the rent: a mall is not a strip shopping center. You or I could probably manage a strip center successfully. If I owned a mall (and believe me, I wouldn't), even I would contract the management of it to people who knew what they were doing, and that I had checked out, and who could be counted on to do it successfully.
You need to have the right tenant mix. You have to have shops that appeal to and connect with well-to-do retail customers and draw them to the mall. You might turn away a potentially lucrative tenant that wouldn't fit in with the other tenants: you might take more of a chance with one that may be a bit more financially speculative but will draw in customers who'll spend lots of money - and hang around the mall and browse while they're there -- and you still have to operate it profitably. (Arguably, the late South Square Mall in Durham, N. C., one that I really liked when I lived there, was done in for lack of a bookstore. It's just one guy's reason for not visiting it too frequently, but something like that does draw people with money who'll hang out for awhile and browse. And you don't have to be too much of a commercial real estate expert to know that the rent paid by big anchor stores, and movie theaters that are part of a mall, barely pays for the space they take up, if even that -- they're there because they draw people to the mall.)
You can't let the facility sit: you're constantly renovating and redecorating -- you have to connect with and appeal to those well-heeled shoppers, and know what they want, and one thing they don't want is to visit a mall that they're getting tired of looking at. You want your space to be constantly evolving.
You'll have to book and stage events that will draw people - the right kind of people. (Who are the 'right' people? That's another delicate balancing act, out of many. For example, teenagers: everyone's biggest worry about malls is the discomfort of teenagers hanging out, and having to worry about what they'll do. Yet, the average teenager is going to show up with about forty to fifty bucks in his pocket - and can spend every penny of it without having to worry about other bills. Management is not going to lightly make a decision about having the security guards shoo that amount of money out of the mall for 'loitering' or 'congregating'. And I've seen more than one mall demand that the local city transit authority remove its bus stop from in front of its property, because no one that came in on the city bus was worth the riff-raff that the mall management and merchants felt that the bus brought in from the wrong parts of town.)
Everything about managing a successful shopping mall is a delicate balancing act. (Most of what I know about mall management comes from a single chapter in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (Anchor Books)) The experience of visiting the mall, for everyone who shows up, is as important as the bricks and mortar, and the stores' inventories.
When I lived in Pennsylvania, I dated a woman who liked upscale eating establishments. I didn't mind, as long as it was once in awhile as a treat, not every time we went out. Here again - the food wasn't that much better: if anything, the portions were smaller and you didn't get as much of it. It was the ambience that you were paying the premium for. Achieving that, and putting it and keeping it in place, requires a high level of skill and the ability to connect -- and the ability to keep what you do connected -- with people who don't mind paying thirty to fifty bucks for a dinner check. It isn't just 'service' and 'making the customer feel welcome' (you can try that in a much more modest establishment and still never have people who don't mind paying thirty to fifty bucks for a dinner check show up -- or be willing to pay more than fifteen bucks for a meal if they do), any more than it's just the expensive cut of meat and the garnish and the presentation, etc., or just the upscale decor in the dining room. It's the sum total of the experience, the synergy, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. She got a lot more out of it than I did - and she could probably do a better job of running a luxury hotel or a shopping mall than I, or that part of it, anyway (she had been a hotel director of sales for several years). I and my company would be better off to stick to select service properties.
Running a hotel at the luxury tier is very much a series of this type of delicate balancing act that is involved in running a successful shopping mall or upscale restaurant. It's more than having the bricks and mortar in place, and having it all work, and even the attention to detail and the more plush sheets and terry. These have to be in place, but in the end, it's the overall ambience and guest experience -- the ability to connect, and to generate what will connect, with people who don't mind paying three to five hundred dollars per night for a hotel room for several nights -- that will count.
Originally appeared on Quora
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