With the word luxury thrown around more than ever, the Travel DAZE panel How to build a Luxury Brand discovered that authenticity and creating more unique and exclusive experiences for luxury travel clients are as important as ever.
Hosted by Travel Weekly general manager and publisher, Hoda Alzubaidi, guests on the in-conversation panel were Ana Andjelic, renowned brand-builder from the New York, David Clark, managing director at Tauck and Hanan Eissa, vice president of Marketing and PR at Atlantis Dubai.
Clark said Tauck avoided using the word and focussing on delivering authentic experiences.
“It really is a word that’s overused, probably overhyped a little bit,” he said. “We get away from just using a word like luxury and just displaying what we deliver and what guests are looking for.”
As aspirational luxury travellers had dwindled in the face of cost-of-living pressures, Andjelic said her focus is on research and implementing strategies to better anticipate the needs of high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth travellers.
“Aspirational luxury consumers are not buying luxury right now, but high net worth individuals and ultra-high net worth have always been buying luxury,” she said. “They’re not price sensitive, and they’re not sensitive to economic hardships, the economic happening.”
Clark said the 100-year-old Tauck brand’s efforts to reach luxury buyers was simple.
“You don’t fish too wide, and you know the audiences that you’re really targeting and the demographic that you’re trying to reach,” he said. “Then I think matching the type of marketing that we do to that type of person – being very clear on and not being misaligned in our messaging.”
Eissa said luxury could mean many things to different people.
“There are so many versions of luxury now that exist in the world,” she said. “There’s quiet luxury, there’s loud luxury. There’s so many different versions and definitions of what luxury is, but absolutely, you never talk about price, because it’s irrelevant.
“If you can afford to pay $1,000-$2,000 a night, it’s irrelevant when you travel.
“The one thing that all high net worth and true high net worth individuals have in common is the luxury of time. Nobody can buy that. So how do you give people back their time when it comes to having a luxury experience? So how do you anticipate their needs? How do you maximize their stay? How do you really understand the value of time and give them that back in holiday?
“So, these are the sort of the tools that we use to talk about experiences and the value of that holiday too. It has nothing to do with price.”
She also spoke of one anecdote where they closed off all the restaurants for one member of a Royal family who wanted the room for himself, wanted to dive in one of the hotel aquariums at 3am, and loved the biryani so much the chef had to write it out for him.
“It’s never saying no, it’s how to make it happen. And that is luxury,” Eissa said.
On the question of starting a luxury travel brand today, Andjelic said she wouldn’t change much at all from when she started decades ago.
“I think it would be the same thing it always was, those fundamentals of human hospitality, because you cannot fake that emotion of feeling welcome somewhere, and you can’t fake really great food and really great service.”
