Luxury and emerging markets, a focus on mobile and the rise of the ‘cool’ hostel are among 2017’s hotel industry trends.
What is luxury? In the highly competitive accommodation industry getting this right is key for top-end RevPAR, and for maximum media headlines, too! Yet, while millionaires are growing rapidly in number, globally there are only 17.9 million of them, according to the Boston Consulting Group. The increasing number splurging out for special occasions or enhancing a work trip far outdistances that!
The luxury segment as well as emerging markets are showing the best growth numbers. Hence forecasts that the conventional luxury hotel market will be worth $19.5bn by 2021 against $15.5bm in 2015, according to US-based Zion Market Research (compared to a 2015 global total of $450bn). Hence, too, the steady increase in new luxury brands.
There have been plenty of allusions to new luxury brands from the major hotel groups in recent weeks. Hilton listed “a five-star luxury soft brand collection, a sort of ‘Hilton Plus’ brand, an urban micro brand and a ‘hostel on steroids’” for 2018. InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), having got the launch of its new midscale Avid Hotels out of the way, is now talking of “something in the luxury space…”
Accor went as far as to say that for it, luxury would be “at the forefront of the next wave of growth”, along with emerging markets.
Marriott too has its eyes on luxury AND Asia. It “plans to double its luxury presence in Asia Pacific by adding more than 100 luxury hotels to its current footprint of 113 luxury properties…” The group, which consolidated its luxury brands last December in a new Luxury Brands Group in December, says it now has 200 luxury hotels in the pipeline.
Those will be very different to the luxury ‘pop-up hotel’ that Marriot did with Coachella, a California music festival. Though pop-up has become a very popular new format.
Other concepts provide more memorable experiences. Icehotel in northern Sweden is built afresh each winter. In warmer climes, Zand Hotel in the Netherlands opened two pop-up hotels made from sand. On offer, too, are yurts in deserts at the back of beyond, (but with five-star kitchens), and hotels sky-high in jungle treetops. And in our anxiety-ridden decade, ‘well-being’ is the theme.
