At the Dorchester Collection of ultra-luxury hotels, we use big data and analytics to help us improve our guest offerings and marketing. Our tool, Metis, analyzes data from online reviews and social media to uncover problems and opportunities. But, as the Dorchester Collection’s director of global guest experience and innovation, I’ve discovered that often the data can only tell you where there’s a problem, not why it exists, or how to fix it. That requires human intervention.
For instance, last year Metis looked at customer sentiment about Parisian luxury hotels. Metis discovered that guests had little loyalty to ours — Le Meurice and Hotel Plaza Athénée — or to our competitors’ hotels. According to Metis’ analysis, guests view Paris’s 5-star hotels as interchangeable. They visit different ones simply to try something new.
But once Metis noted this lack of customer loyalty, it was up to us to figure out why, and what to do about it.
Observation and Investigation in Paris
We began by studying the market. Paris has ten Forbes five-star hotels – second only to Macau (which was awarded two this year). All Paris five-star hotels have Michelin-starred restaurants; they all provide luxury amenities (champagne, chocolates) on check-in; their rooms are roughly the same sizes and sell at similar rates.
No wonder people see them as interchangeable.
Our job would be to differentiate ours.
The Plaza Athénée’s staff observed the clothes its guests wore and the shops they visited. Clearly, many were either participants in or close observers of the high-fashion world. Accordingly, the hotel decided to position and market itself as the Haute Couture hotel where, in 1947, designer Christian Dior debuted his inaugural collection. The hotel introduced the Dior spa and placed Guerlain products in the bathrooms. It created a ballroom called Le Salon Haute Couture, and for Fashion Week it presented a Dior-themed service at the restaurant. And, it came up with a slogan: “It’s not what you wear, it’s where you wear it.”
Le Meurice, on the other hand, has long been a place where artists go (Salvador Dali made it his Paris headquarters) and Le Meurice staff observed that many of the guests stayed there to visit the galleries and museums. Accordingly, the hotel decided to brand Le Meurice as the contemporary arts hotel. Among other things, it sponsored an award of €20,000 for promising artists two weeks before the Paris Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) art fair and replaced the classical art typical of Parisian 5-star hotels with contemporary art. It also re-named one of its restaurants Le Dali.
