The luxury of attention is the unforced, unwavering attention of one person to another, which has become scarce in a life mediated by screens and is what the world's best hotels and restaurants actually sell. A guest can still buy a fine room almost anywhere, and what they increasingly cannot buy elsewhere is an hour of someone's undivided attention.
The phrase gives the book its title, and it came out of eighty interviews with hoteliers and chefs rather than out of any theory about luxury. Over the years I spent listening, two shifts ran in parallel. Luxury itself moved from the possession of things to the experience of being spared from having to think about them. At the same time the surface of daily life filled with screens built to break concentration into smaller and smaller pieces, and the plain attention of one person to another became, against the run of the whole economy, scarce. The people in this book had been producing exactly that attention for decades, on purpose, every day. The market has only recently caught up with the fact that it was always the thing worth paying for.
In a hotel the luxury of attention is what the general manager is doing when she walks the lobby at quarter to seven in the morning, before any guest has come down, checking the standard a hundred small ways for an arrival that has not yet happened. In a kitchen it is what the chef is doing at the pass at quarter to eight, having already briefed the brigade on the allergies, the anniversary and the previous order of the guest at table four. Neither of them will describe this as attention. Both are rehearsing for a person who will never know how much preparation preceded the moment they felt recognized.
The phrase is easily confused with service, with personalization or with the experiential luxury the trend reports describe. Service is what a guest asks for and receives, and personalization is a system that remembers a preference. Experiential luxury is the category the analysts use for the shift. The luxury of attention is the human discipline underneath all of these: a person noticing another person closely enough to act before the request is made. Amit Majumder, who ran Jumeirah Vittaveli in the Maldives when we spoke, put the guest’s side of it in one sentence.
“True luxury is having what you’re merely thinking about be presented to you before you voice that desire.” Amit Majumder, then General Manager, Jumeirah Vittaveli, Maldives
What the idea asks of a leader is to treat attention as the product and to protect the conditions under which a team can keep giving it. A tired team or a frightened team cannot notice anyone. The leader’s job is to notice the team as closely as the team is expected to notice the guest, and to keep practicing a discipline that the rest of life is quietly training out of everyone.
The idea runs through the Introduction and A Final Note, and takes its most concrete form in Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, where attention becomes the discipline of anticipation.