How storytelling for luxury hotels can convert the modern traveller
Dialogue Agency
Creating multichannel content that informs, inspires and excites your audience.
A recent webinar from the International Luxury Hotel Association , titled ‘Are you ready for the changing luxury traveller?’, brought up some interesting points about the nature of today’s luxury traveller (younger), the types of travel they seek (experiential) and the content needed to communicate it (comprehensive, creative and personalised).
Know your audience
The conversation between Greg Habeeb, Chief Development Officer at World Hotels, and Barak Hirschowitz, President of International Luxury Hotels Association, explored the topic of the changing luxury traveller. They talked about the growing importance of editorial in luxury hotel marketing, with Habeeb highlighting the changing demographic of the new luxury traveller as being pivotal: “We are seeing major shifts in blending. The average age of the luxury customer is coming down, especially since COVID-19.”
He also referenced the changing expectations of this younger luxury traveller at World Hotels, saying: “The younger generation have their whole world in their hands with a phone and have a world of information and subscribe to many different sources, so you really have to respond to their needs. Also, many of them don’t want to interrupt what they were doing at home, so you’d better have a great fitness facility; they may have certain eating habits – gluten-free, vegetarian… – so hotels have to have those offerings and levels of customisation.”
It is this personalised and experiential offering that needs communicating clearly to prospective customers, so storytelling is crucial here. Hirschowitz asked how Habeeb is leveraging technology to enhance the guest’s stay and Habeeb responded: “The question is: how do you deliver a three-dimensional?experience into a two-dimensional technology space? First, it's simply looking at photos, words, content – content is king for hotels. Then we have to make sure that all the media?is ready and handheld, ready for room choices and amenities. Third, the technology is not just for transactional bookings. It has to be a bit editorial because that’s what people are buying into – it’s not just about booking a room – so we’ve?been adjusting our main websites to read more editorially. We’re giving the choice of editorial at the very top of the website: beach days, arts, culture, gourmet dining, sustainability, fitness. We have to really look at our portfolio and promote the most current and modern content to educate the decision-maker.”
The five Cs of luxury travel
Travel expert Skift has done plenty of research around the changing face of the luxury consumer and identified the 5 Cs of luxury travel as culture, cuisine, community, content and customisation.
The experts at McKinsey agree and, in February and March 2024, McKinsey?surveyed?more than 5,000 people in China, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States who had taken at least one leisure trip in the past two years. The results showed:
McKinsey’s research highlighted: “The luxury hospitality space is projected to grow faster than any other segment, at?6% per year?through 2025. Competition for luxury hotels is intensifying too; customers now have the option of renting luxurious villas with staff or booking non-luxury hotels with luxury accoutrements such as rainfall showerheads and mattress toppers.” It also points out that the modern consumer, in the luxury space and elsewhere, “values experiences over tangible things.”
A window to the luxury world
In the world of luxury travel, from hotels and resorts to superyachts, the website is a shop window to the travel experience. Beautiful photography and an intuitive user experience both on desktop and, most crucially, mobile are must-haves. However, to capture the attention of the luxury customer, you need to go further than just nice pictures of the hotel and put storytelling content first.
Knowing that this younger cohort of luxury travellers are seeking experiences, destinations and hotels need to clearly and creatively communicate what they offer that makes them stand out.
Photography is key to presenting an enticing offering to discerning travellers. Dialogue’s Creative Director Rich Berry is experienced at seeking out the best visual stories to present travel experiences in exciting ways: “For long-standing Dialogue client Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St Moritz, we produce a luxury print magazine and a digital content platform. High-quality imagery is crucial to presenting the hotel and all it offers. I recently headed over to St Moritz with a team to art direct photoshoots. It was really nice to be able to see for myself what makes the hotel experience so extraordinary and it inspired me on the spot to unearth and capture new stories.”
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The mixture of print and digital allows Badrutt’s Palace Hotel to fully explore its experiences via the lifestyle website Tower Revue and the print magazine of the same name, and present them in fresh and exciting ways to this new demographic of travellers. The beautiful photography is bolstered by strong feature articles written by some of the world’s leading travel and lifestyle journalists.
In a world saturated by online content, it is important that the stories are told in an engaging and effective manner. Alexander Marakovits, Public Relations Manager at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel, says: “In this day and age, when so much happens online or via social media, a print magazine is something that needs to stand out from the usual channels and provide the opportunity to cover subjects in more depth. The magazine should be a pleasure to read, and it is important for us that Dialogue works with the best journalists and photographers to create worthy, third-party editorial that is credible rather than PR content.”
A personal touch
Pushing content outwards is crucial. Content produced by luxury travel brands can obviously be showcased on a website or in a lifestyle publication, but don’t discount personalised content provision via email marketing.
As Habeeb and Hirschowitz discuss, personalisation of luxury travel is a key development. Habeeb says: “Technology has transformed luxury travel. We’re doing a better job before the guest arrives. For instance, if you are a yoga enthusiast, you have a yoga mat and proper towels when you arrive. We’re doing a lot more in advanced data collection of the guests so, when they arrive, it feels even more customised.”
This ethos should also be applied to content. If you are collecting data about your customers, you should be using it to serve relevant articles to them in the build-up to arrival. Using targeted emails and a data-driven content plan, you can serve bespoke content to customers post-booking – encouraging upselling – and you can target your social and online content according to all you know about your target demographic.
Fundamentally, if you understand this new type of luxury traveller, you can provide content that resonates with them, on channels that they want to interact with, and which is more effective across your marketing channels.
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