Fairmont Hits Top Spot for Corporate Luxury

Fairmont Hotels and Resorts emerged as the winner in the Luxury category of the 2022 BTN Hotel Survey, earning the highest average rating from buyers for eight out of 13 criteria and ranking first in the combined scoring too.

But does the corporate guest segment as a whole continue to score highly among Luxury hotel providers in terms of their priorities? There has been a well-documented boom in leisure guests at the top end of the hotel market, and they are guests who pay top dollar with no pesky demands like corporate discounts.

Meenaz Diamond, senior vice president, sales worldwide for Accor, which owns the Fairmont brand, insists corporate guests remain hugely important. “There’s no doubt we’ve seen an over-indexing of leisure post-pandemic and that’s something that’s going to continue, but we want to have a healthy business mix,” Diamond said.

“The leisure segment ends up paying more and is flexible about when it travels, so we like the leisure segment for sure, but we want the business travelers too because they also spend money; not  necessarily on the hotel room, but they are spending in other areas like the restaurants and meetings and events.”

Trends Point Corporate Travel to Top End of Market?

The luxury brands’ owners insist the opposite also remains true: that corporate customers still want top-end hotels even when many more modestly priced options have become available.

Betty Wilson, vice president for global accounts at IHG Hotels & Resorts, which operates in the Luxury segment through the InterContinental brand among others, has noticed no reduction in demand from corporate customers. “Certain segments of the corporate market see luxury hotels as more important to their business travel mix,” she said, citing financial, professional and legal services as the leading examples.

Diamond believes luxury is even gaining momentum among some corporate clients. One reason she offers is greater employer solicitude post-pandemic, especially in North America, for traveler well-being. Another is the trend for bleisure. Combining business and pleasure in a single trip, Diamond said, is especially popular “at the top end of the market. If you’re staying for a longer period of time, you want to have a certain number of comforts around you.”

Among those key comforts is “larger rooms and working areas, plus more food choices. What travelers are looking for is flexibility, which, along with space and facilities, is better served at the top end of the hotel market,” Diamond said.

Also driving greater hunger for space and flexibility is the phenomenon of remote working. Like bleisure, it blurs the lines of where and when executives work, and therefore what they require from a luxury hotel. “We've reimagined the guest experience at many of our hotels to meet their evolving needs,” said Tristan Dowell, global vice president of luxury, lifestyle & leisure sales for Hyatt, whose Grand Hyatt brand placed second among corporate buyer voters in the BTN 2022 Hotel Survey. “We have optimized more functional spaces to work, provided more communal spaces for guests to collaborate and built out remote work infrastructures.”

Resources Challenge Delivery of Luxury

None of these enhancements, however, has been easy for hotel operators at a time when labor shortages and fast-rising costs have made it a challenge to maintain services and facilities at the pre-pandemic levels of excellence which top-tier guests expect.

“At the property level it’s about being honest and transparent about what services are being offered to guests given staffing levels,” said Dowell. “The priority of our hotels is to deliver the highest quality guest experience with the hotel teams we have available.”

Hyatt is working hard to reverse the talent drain from the hospitality sector, including an initiative to recruit 10,000 staff locally through its RiseHY program. Diamond said Fairmont places strong emphasis on retention as well as recruitment. “It starts by looking after our people,” she said. “How can we make employees’ lives easier?” One example has been offering more flexible shift patterns. 

In addition to employees and guests, another important stakeholder relationship for luxury brands is travel managers. Fairmont, Grand Hyatt and InterContinental all rate highest for different criteria relevant to the buyer rather than the traveler in the BTN Hotel Survey. Fairmont comes top for its partnership approach and scores particularly highly versus competitors for the quality of its sales staff. 

“We really focus on ensuring our salespeople are well looked after and we didn’t reduce their numbers as much as some other companies did in the pandemic,” said Diamond. “We also brought people back earlier, and we kept very close to our customers,” for example through virtual roundtable discussions and advisory boards and even online yoga sessions.

InterContinental, meanwhile, achieves the top score for data and reporting quality. It operates a self-service portal, which, said Wilson, will be more secure, accessible, scalable and flexible following the “recent migration of our data platform to a cloud-based solution.”

Hyatt comes first for flexibility on negotiating amenities and effective communication to buyers. It is also top for overall price-to-value relationship, an equation that is particularly difficult to get right at the luxury end of the market where both expectations and rates are high—and constantly changing.

“The corporate client’s perception of value in luxury is absolutely evolving,” said Dowell. “In the past, it was about getting premium accommodation at a specific price. Customers are now looking at the holistic value offering in their stay experience. The pandemic has taught us the value of luxury, and customers are willing to pay for an enhanced stay. However, it’s important the extra value is communicated effectively and aligns well with their wants and needs.”