What 5-star Luxury Hospitality Brands Do Right

There are a lot of 5-star luxury hospitality brands, and I have led guest and employee experience projects for many of them. There is a reason that so many other industries benchmark luxury hospitality, but it's also an industry struggling to deliver consistently on big promises.

In luxury hospitality, the hard product is incredibly similar, so the experience is the only true differentiation that drives loyalty, referrals, and repeat stays.

Unfortunately, many of these brands, no matter how prestigious, no longer deliver luxury experiences that live up to their promises.

Like all industries, it’s easy to take your eye off the ball and coast on historic reputation.

I want to highlight one that is making investments to deliver consistent, sustainable, world-class experiences!

I recently had the pleasure to spend 5 days with the colleagues at The Langham Chicago and work alongside their exceptional General Manager.

These teams are doing an incredible job - worthy of their Michelin Two Keys!

What are they doing right?

👉 Starting every shift with time spent on their culture and celebrating each other. Non-negotiable.

👉 Incredible discipline about arrivals and departures, knowing guests, and taking care in every word, gesture, and moment from the valet to the front desk and beyond.

👉 Hiring for talent, passion, and personality. Training for the rest. Never settling.

👉 Consistently using guests’ names and remembering preferences so they can personalize every interaction. I mean EVERY interaction. Wow moments were happening everywhere I looked, and guests could recount them easily to me when asked.

👉 Empowering colleagues to deliver big and small experiences all day long. I had multiple Wow moments every single day. In every space I visited. And I interviewed other guests, at random, who experienced the same.

👉 Housekeeping was beyond exceptional. Everything was done with a level of care, tiny special touches, and attention to detail that was beyond standard luxury care. I had an opportunity to discuss this with guests - who all agreed!

I could go on.

But the point isn’t that The Langham is incredible (they are, though!), it’s that this level of execution in any business requires the things listed above. If you want your customer, guest, or client to rave about your company, you have to be prepared to take all the actions needed to deliver.

It’s easy to talk a good CX game – many organizations love to espouse their supposedly industry-leading customer experience, most hiding behind inflated CSAT, NPS, and customer surveys that don’t paint the whole picture.

The true leaders in the space are doing more than talking, and their conscious and deliberate efforts to establish consistent and sustainable experiences for their clients shine through in their engagements every single day.

And that’s what differentiates every experience-centric organization from their competitors: they don’t tell you who they are – they show you who they are.