The Great Hotel Branding

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1:49Carol Massar:Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. You're not going nuts. Don't worry. Hotel rooms are all starting to look the same, whether you're paying$500 a night or$1 ,500 a night. Listen, there's a little quiz on the website, and it's three hotels, and you have to put what they cost. And nobody will get these right. I got one right. No. You got one right. No, and you can do it in Kyoto. You can do it in Miami. Yeah. Brandon Presser would know. He's been in more than 3 ,000 hotels. He spends an average of 200 nights on the road each year.

2:29He recently wrote about what he calls, quote, the great hotel Blanding. Brandon Presser is Bloomberg Pursuits travel columnist. He's on the road, as he usually is. So why are all hotels starting to look the same, whether you're paying$1 ,500 a night or$500 a night? Well, I think the answer is actually more complicated than it seems. I think that we can think about big corporations and the pipelines where they all buy the same beds and the same nightstands from the same places. But the answer is actually a lot more complicated and has to do with human behavior, too.

3:09Carol Massar:What do you mean? We travel. It seems like we travel a lot more. And in a way, we do. But our trips have become a lot shorter over the last 100 years. And we don't dress up for different activities like we used to. We dress more casually now. So we use less storage space in a hotel as well. So all of these things are being taken out of hotels, like drawers and closets, and they're not being replaced with anything. That is so true. And I will say, like, we do a lot of quick trips. Don't even make me. Okay. Well, I do carry. Don't even make me go there. But there's a lot of times, if I'm just there for a couple of days, I'm living out of my suitcase even.

3:50Carol Massar:Like, you know what I mean? So that I can quickly, because we just have to, you know, I carry a lot of suitcases. This is his point, Brandon. So he's laughing. But I agree with you. There's like, there's the closet and there's the thing to lay your suitcase on, but there's not a lot of storage stuff. But that's not even I mean, that's that's part of the story. But isn't a big part of the story to the consolidation that we've seen with with Marriott and like basically two other hotel companies that own a good portion of the hotels? Yeah, absolutely. There's sort of a big six. And basically it accounts for over 60 % of the world's hotels are basically owned by six corporations.

4:31And, you know, if you're someone who wants to open a hotel, you're sort of incentivized to bring them in to manage your hotel because they have access to this pipeline. So everything becomes cheaper. It's an easier investment. And then you get to slap the name of a fancy hotel on your property. and the value of that property will increase instantly, you know, because it's, you know, now it's Park Hyatt.

4:53Carol Massar:Well, listen, the other thing I would say, right, Brandon? I mean, a hotel that will remain nameless, but when it first came out and it was kind of cool and it was a boutique-y hotel, but it was super dark, right? And for those of us, and it was very much a part of, like, the business choices, that you'd go there. don't don't sounds like but it's just like I get who it was for but like we'd be there for work and like I'd be like I need a light I can't see anything so I guess what I would say is that hotels want to be you know it's like when you're selling a house you paint everything white or cream right you don't want to offend anybody because you just want to sell it same thing with a hotel room you want to go in you want to be ah it's relaxing right you don't want to play around with too many crazy pieces of art or something or a crazy rug or bedspread that people are like, I really don't like it.

5:44Carol Massar:I want to be out of here. Absolutely. I mean, for me personally, I think that my favorite hotels are the ones that nine people love and one person hates. But I think that, you know, I spoke to a lot of execs, a lot of design execs at all of these big corporations. And one of them said there's comfort and familiarity so if it becomes this very agnostic design then we'll all maybe feel more comfortable i don't know but i think one of the things that you were you were touching on too is this very moody hotel that we won't name um was bring was kind of ushering in an era of turning the lobby into a cool space and that's also why the rooms are bland because lobbies are where a lot of the investment is being focused.

6:33And we live in this experience economy. So we're keen to post our experiences on Instagram and sort of commodify those experiences. And you don't really do it in your room because you're asleep. One thing I'm curious, Brandon, about your view on this because you spend so much time in hotels. But one thing that's really surprised me over the last couple of years is the way that um even at expensive hotels uh that should have these things working properly you go into a room and it's like the phone doesn't work don't get tim started on this i was somewhere recently my door wouldn't lock like it like wasn't that the door lock wasn't working i couldn't leave the room without my stuff um the toilets sometimes aren't cleaned and like these are places where where we travel for work and they're the only place game in town and you have to spend so much money and they're expensive because there are conferences there is it just me or is the service getting worse yeah no service is an issue too um and you know if you're looking at all the stats of the ascendant generation of future hotel employees there's almost a 20 % gap in service needs at all of these hotels, meaning every year millions of hotels are opening and there's simply no one to work at them.

7:56Yeah.

7:57Carol Massar:Yeah. That makes sense. Well, and then so, you know, you kind of cover this too, right? In the story that there are certain things that are easier to clean, right? You know, a laminate floor versus a carpet with a stain on it, which is always like, ew, in my fashion. Anyway. Okay. But I mean, you know, right? If you can't have enough staff, I see increasingly like, you know, do you want our room clean? Do you want to pass it? And I understand some of it's for the environment and hang out to the towels for the whole week because that does help the environment. But I do think about not having the labor that's needed to kind of care for the spaces.

8:32Yeah. You know, in fairness, the amount of time it takes to, you know, clean a carpet versus a laminate floor, it's not huge numbers. Like it wouldn't account for having one less housekeeper on the staff, but it's things like having to take a room out of commission because there's a huge stain on the floor that they then need to, you know, bring in, you know, the engineer to tear the floor up. And it's more those types of things that were sort of a happy accident in COVID that we all discovered. I always like when I go to a room and there's somebody already in there

9:12Carol Massar:excuse me sorry sorry it's not the equivalent when you get on a plane and somebody's sitting in your seat or the time last year Carol where we went and you had three hotel rooms and Sebastian and I had none that was a fun adventure too that's so true it's like kind of cray cray stuff um I'm trying to remember too where there was some man might have been with my family where we walked in in the bathroom or was this on a work trip and it was i've had two bathroom i've had three bathroom incidents in recent years you're like i'm out of here i don't even want you to clean it i'm out of here i don't know maybe my standards might be too high i don't know i think i've reached a point where i've been to so many hotels that only bad things are sort of bound to happen um i have definitely checked into a room and opened the door and there was someone on the toilet.

10:00Carol Massar:That is so wrong. That is so wrong. Hey, listen, I just to wrap up though, I love how you kicked off the story that you say it's not like, listen, people are probably listening. They're like, Oh, these guys, they're just so complaining. I mean, they're traveling, they get to go in a hotel room. People can say that about me. That's fine. But you, you said even the Google lens, um, alphabets, alphabets, powerful photo identification tool has trouble distinguishing, you know, which hotel room is where, correct? It's true. And the thing that I really want to drive home about this story and the quiz is that we're not comparing a room that's$300 versus four.

10:33We're comparing a room that's$300 versus$1 ,300. And you can take that to other factors in your life. If you looked at a house, if you add three zeros and look at a house that's$300 ,000 versus a house that's$1.4 million, you can feel the difference between those two houses. Why can't we feel the difference between two hotel rooms that are the same level of difference?

10:56Carol Massar:I'll tell you that. My measure is always the pillows and the bed. Right? Like, don't you? Like a good bed and the pillows are like. There are towels. And the towels. Towels are another thing. Also, the noise of the air conditioner. What about the elevator that is going all night? That's a fun one. I don't know what it is. All you have to do is when you make the reservation, just say, I'd like not to be near the elevator. Then you get there. And they're like, oh, sorry, the only room we have is next to the elevator. It's between the elevator and the ice machine. I'm a fun guy to travel with. He's funny.

11:31Don't worry. I know. Yeah.

11:33Carol Massar:And then we actually have a colleague we work with who always seems to get like the presidential suite. Yep, that's Sebastian. Whose name, yes, exactly. Interesting. We go to his rooms and we're like, how did you get this? What is up with that? Brandon, your stuff, whenever it pops up, we're like, we know we want to talk with you. It's always a fun read and just a fun reporting out by you. Brandon, thanks so much. Brandon Pressler, he's Bloomberg Pursuit's travel columnist. He is on the road as he usually is. You can check out his story. It's fun. Do the quiz. See if you can figure out which hotel is$700 versus$1 ,400.

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