Experiential luxury is the shift in what luxury means, from what a guest possesses to what a guest experiences, feels and is spared from having to think about. It is the market's name for what the best hotels and restaurants have always sold, and in a life mediated by screens its scarcest ingredient is one person's undivided attention to another.
The term belongs to the analysts. The trend reports from Skift, McKinsey and CBRE describe a luxury market that has moved from the transactional to the experiential, and they describe it correctly. What the reports do not always capture, and what the people in this book do, is the gesture and the sentence that the shift looks like when it is executed well. I use the analysts’ term here because it is the one a reader will have met elsewhere.
What sits underneath is attention. The guest can still afford a fine room. What they increasingly cannot buy anywhere else is an hour of undivided attention, their own or anyone else’s, because the surface of daily life has filled with screens built to break concentration into smaller and smaller fragments. The operators saw the shift before the reports named it. Nicholas Yarnell, then general manager of Six Senses Douro Valley in Portugal, was already running more than thirty complimentary experiences a week, from pickling workshops in an Earth Lab to a resident azulejo artist teaching tile painting, convinced that what the guest remembers is what the property arranged for them to do.
“We spend a great deal of time and effort crafting experiences that will delight and surprise our guests.” Nicholas Yarnell, then general manager of Six Senses Douro Valley
The analysts call it experiential luxury. Yarnell was describing his week. In a kitchen the same shift shows up as Kwong Wai Keung at T’ang Court, behind a three Michelin starred Cantonese pass, rebalancing meat and vegetables in a dish because his diners have become more health conscious. Experiential luxury is often confused with programming, and the confusion produces a great deal of expensive activity. A property can schedule forty activities a week and deliver none of the substance, because the substance is the noticing, the hour of attention a trained team directs at a particular guest. The shift is new only at the scale the rest of the industry is now being asked to produce it. The chef whose briefing before service rehearses for one diner’s evening, the general manager whose lobby walk registers a returning guest by name, the concierge whose personal network produces something the guest could not have requested because it had not yet been imagined: these are the practices the analysts now identify as experiential luxury, and they predate the term by decades.
What the shift asks of a leader is an answer to a narrower question than whether to compete on experience. That question is settled. The open one is what specific experience the property is uniquely positioned to deliver, and whether the operating discipline to deliver it consistently has been built. Kai Speth, then general manager of The Reverie Saigon, warned that a true luxury offering cannot be achieved if cost cutting is the norm, and that success comes from investing in people. The budget that matters most is still the one spent on the people who pay attention.
The idea runs through the Introduction and Chapter 14, The Future of Luxury and Craft, and it is the market side of the argument that A Final Note makes about attention.