With 21 brands in its portfolio, including six in the luxury lifestyle space, IHG Hotels & Resorts is expanding into established destinations, emerging markets and new locations for brands such as Six Senses, Regent and Vignette Collection.
But the company’s growth is about more than adding properties. From bringing Six Senses into urban destinations to rethinking wellness and creating accommodations for multigenerational families, IHG is responding to changing traveler expectations.
Recommend sat down with Tom Rowntree, IHG Hotels & Resorts’ VP of Global Luxury Brands, to discuss the company’s luxury expansion, the experiences shaping its brands and the role travel advisors play in that evolution.
Recommend magazine: IHG has expanded its luxury lifestyle portfolio significantly. Where are you seeing the biggest opportunities for growth?
Tom Rowntree: We have a portfolio of 21 brands, with six in the luxury lifestyle space, including Six Senses, Regent, InterContinental, Kimpton, Vignette Collection and Hotel Indigo. We’re the second largest in the world in terms of number of hotels in luxury lifestyle. To illustrate that, we’re opening 90 hotels over the course of the next 18 months.
What we’re seeing is growth in established markets and established destinations. But we’re also seeing growth in secondary and tertiary markets in established countries. So, what we see is travelers going into countries like Japan…wanting to discover more and go deeper into the country. We’re opening a Regent in Karuizawa, we’ll be opening a Six Senses in Myoko, a ski resort location.
Then we’ve got the third bit, which is that new markets are continuing to open up. So, for example, next year we’ll be opening an InterContinental in Tiranë in Albania.
Recommend magazine: Six Senses has traditionally been associated with remote resorts. Why is the brand expanding into cities, and how does the experience translate to an urban setting?
Tom Rowntree: The very DNA of Six Senses is remote island destinations…and Six Senses is a resort first brand. But what we see is opportunities to open in select urban locations.
We have Six Senses in Kyoto that opened a couple years ago. We have Six Senses in Rome. Six Senses London opened earlier this year. We’ll be opening a Six Senses in Milan. [This is a result of] guests telling us that they wanted Six Senses in destinations that they’re going to frequently. We’re very deliberate with where we will go.
Obviously, if you’re in Six Senses Yao Noi [in Thailand] and then you’re in Six Senses London, it’s going to be fundamentally different.
What we did is do a lot of work to [look at] the pillars of the brand on sustainability, wellness and crafted experiences—which are absolutely the blueprint of Six Senses—and how do we then bring those to life in an urban location?
Recommend magazine: Vignette Collection is one of IHG’s newer brands. What makes it different and what types of properties are joining the collection?
Tom Rowntree: We saw the need and the opportunity for us to develop a collection brand for hotel owners that have individual hotels that need to have access to the enterprise contribution that a group like IHG can [deliver] for them.
Then of course, we see this through the trend where guests want to have those unique and individual one-off experiences that individual hotels [provide].
I’ll give you a good example. I was in Bangkok recently and I went over to Phuket and stayed at a resort called the Dinso Resort in Patong. It’s built into the side of a very, very steep hill and you have these amazing villas that [extend out from the slope], each with private pools. It’s not an upper luxury price point; it’s an approachable luxury price point.
In Portugal, we have one that’s an old monastery, with like 50 rooms: Casa da Companhia, Hotel & Spa. [Currently], we have 37 open, just under 40, and then about another 40 coming. This spectrum of hotels that we have across the Vignette Collection is just really interesting.
Recommend magazine: Wellness has become a major focus in luxury travel. How is IHG approaching wellbeing beyond traditional spas and treatments?
Tom Rowntree: I think it’s an interesting one…. I’ve been very fortunate to meet people like you over the course of the last few months all around the world and I think it’s probably the number one subject that comes up—wellness.
My personal frustration is that a lot of hotel companies will develop a spa and say, ‘Tick, we’ve done wellness.’ But that’s not wellness. It is so much more than that.
It’s so inherently personal.
So, I think that the role the hotels have—of course you need to develop amazing spas and have those offerings—it’s really understanding what the guest wants to feel when it comes to wellness and we then facilitate that.
Recommend magazine: Multigenerational travel continues to grow. How is IHG adapting its luxury resorts to accommodate families traveling together?
Tom Rowntree: What we’ve been observing in a lot of our resorts is how families are behaving. What they tend to do during the course of the day is they’ll go off as individuals or as couples. It might be that the grandfather goes sailing with the granddaughter. It could be father goes with daughter and goes off to the spa. It could be son goes off to play tennis. Then what they do is they reconvene over meal periods and then sometimes don’t actually want to be in the restaurant because they want to be noisy. They want to be en famille; you know, ‘in the family.’
So, what we’re now building are villas that allow that flexibility of space. In Regent Phuket, for example, we have beachfront villas that actually interconnect through gardens into other villas. There might be a 1-bedroom villa that interconnects into a 4-bedroom villa, [which features] a dining room or the kitchen area is big enough for everyone to convene together. Then we send a chef down….
Recommend magazine: How important are travel advisors to IHG’s business, not just in generating bookings but also in shaping the company’s brands and guest experiences?
Tom Rowntree: Critically important. In fact, we do a lot with travel advisors. We have a number of advisory boards where we have travel advisors that come in and consult us.
It’s really, really valuable because they understand their travelers better than we ever will.
