They want to be known without having to explain themselves. In the words of the hoteliers I interviewed, luxury is having what you are merely thinking about presented before you voice it, and recreating what the guest already has at home or would like to. The visible sign of it is the absence of friction.
Ask the question at a marketing meeting and the answers come back as adjectives: exclusive, bespoke, curated. Ask the people who run the properties and the answers are concrete. Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris, told me that luxury today is recreating an experience of what a guest already has at home, or would like to have at home. That sentence sets a standard most properties never meet, because it requires the property to know what the guest has at home.
Amit Majumder, then general manager of Jumeirah Vittaveli in the Maldives, gave me the version that reaches furthest.
“True luxury is having what you’re merely thinking about be presented to you before you voice that desire.” Amit Majumder, then general manager of Jumeirah Vittaveli, Maldives
Put the two together and the answer to the question is this. Luxury guests want to be known, in advance, well enough that they never have to explain themselves. The pillow is already right. The allergy has already reached the kitchen. The restaurant the concierge suggests is the one for the mood they had not realized they were in. Majumder added that every luxury brand now invests in mechanisms to track preferences, and what separates the brands is how the information is used. The tools are available to anyone. The discipline of acting on what they surface is rare.
The best illustration I heard of the whole principle was small. Nicholas Yarnell, then general manager of Six Senses Douro Valley in Portugal, told me about a young American woman with a serious peanut allergy. When she arrived nervously for her first meal, the server told her the chefs already knew and she had nothing to worry about. At the end of the meal he handed her a card on which he had written a note in Portuguese, so she could hand it to the manager of any restaurant in the region and be understood. The property had anticipated a need she had not yet voiced and might not have recognized: the next meal, outside the hotel, in a language she did not speak. Yarnell said the card cost nothing and brought her to tears. That is what luxury guests want. Someone thought about the next thing before they did.
The chef world has learned the same lesson more quietly. The diner who marked an anniversary last year finds a discreet acknowledgment this year without mentioning it on the booking. The diner with a documented shellfish allergy never has to remind the captain. The diner who lingered over the third course last time finds the pace slightly extended tonight. None of it is announced, and a guest who has eaten in enough serious restaurants now expects it. The kitchen that does not invest in knowing its regulars loses them within a few years.
Two qualifications from the operators who do this best. The first is that what guests want changes. Philip Barnes, then general manager of The Savoy, cautioned that a guest history is a snapshot in time. New partner, new diet, new health situation: a reference to the previous version of a guest is worse than no reference at all, so the team validates in person. The second is that guests want recognition and do not want surveillance. The preferred pillow on the bed delights. The wine selected for them on the strength of one order two years ago unsettles. The first removes friction. The second takes a decision that was the guest’s to make.
The deeper claim the chapter makes is that anticipation done well is invisible. Guests do not register the research or the noticing as separate events. They register that the room felt right and the meal was paced to their evening. The visible artifact of what they want is an absence: no wrong pillow, no friction, no conversation in which they had to explain themselves.
Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, sets out how the best properties build and maintain that knowledge, the four rungs of the Anticipation Ladder, and the five part posture that keeps attention from feeling like being watched.