SMALL Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH) is a brand of luxury, independent hotels offering one-of-a-kind memorable experiences. The company, which celebrated its 20th year anniversary last year, has over 520 hotels in 72 countries offering a diverse variety of resorts from spas, country houses, golf resorts, island retreats, city sanctuaries, to game and wilderness lodges. TTN caught up with Paul J Kerr, chief executive officer of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, during The International Luxury Travel Mart to find out more.
Kerr…..550 hotels by 2012
How does a property benefit under the SLH portfolio?
For starters they automatically become a member of a brand of like-minded hotels. We also offer them strong distribution channels, which is highly beneficial for smaller hotels.
They also get the benefit of education, because we help them through a minefield of distribution systems and hotel rates.
The Club of Small Luxury Hotels of the World is a guest recognition programme with 140,000 members. 50 per cent of all SLH bookings are brought by Club members.
Members of The Club get several benefits like free nights, early-check-in, late check-out. The reason the Club has been so successful is because we offer them choice. Membership now exists in three tiers – Special, Love and Honoured, with the benefits increasing the more a client stays at an SLH property.
What kind of luxury experience are your guests seeking today?
I believe that guests today want an experience that they can talk about when they get home. Small hotels offer big experiences and we offer our guests a choice through our 520 hotels. The hotels are all individually owned. The bigger you get, the harder it is to give personalised service. The average size of our hotel has remained 50 rooms in the last 20 years. This allows for authentic personalised services, which reflect the local cultures. Irrespective of the size of the property, they are luxurious properties. 80 per cent of all our hotels are driven by leisure guests. Although we have a lot of corporate hotels, only 20 per cent are booking at corporate rates.
An example I would like to give here is the Orange County Coorg Hotel in Karnataka, India. This is a small hotel offering 66 rooms on a 300 acre coffee and spice plantation resort perched at a height of 800m above sea level. Every guest who stays at this hotel takes back with them the memory and experience of the region from picking peppercorns and watching coffee being ground or go on a fishing boat on the River Cauvery. I believe going forward; more guests are seeking these contrast luxury experiences.
What can we expect to see on your development pipeline?
We added 49 new properties to our portfolio in 2011, out of which 25 were in Europe, 11 in Americas and 13 in Asia Pacific. The Asia Pacific is a huge market for us with and accounts for 23 per cent of our entire portfolio, compared to just two per cent in 1991. Currently the company’s Asian portfolio includes 16 properties in India and 12 in China.
We would like to take our total number of hotels to 550 by the end of 2012. This will include properties in some new destinations including Hawaii, Latin America, China, India and Japan in Asia and Oman, Abu Dhabi, Jordan in the Middle East. We also plan to add hotels form Croatia, Turkey and Malta to the SLH portfolio.
We have not seen properties in Dubai that we believe would fit out portfolio yet, but there is always a possibility in the near future. This also depends on how many of our club members travelling around the world want to visit Dubai.
Who are your key source markets today? Do you see a lot of Arab guests in your properties?
Our top five are the US, UK, Germany, Australia and Canada. And no, we don’t really see a huge demand from the Arab market into our properties around the world. But we hope that will change in the future, since we have some wonderful properties that can offer them the luxury and privacy they look for.
Are your customer’s technology-friendly? Do you receive bookings from SLH.com?
Yes and we have launched an iPhone app which has already had 55,000 downloads. We are also keen to build on our social media outreach, expanding brand awareness and methods of communication with guests and agents internationally via Facebook, Twitter and other online tools. The brand now has almost 40,000 fans on Facebook with a steadily growing fan base from around the world. Additionally, SLH now has over 7,000 Twitter followers.
We have seen a 71 per cent increase in revenues and reservations from SLH.com year-to-date. 20 per cent of all our bookings are from our website.
source: http://www.ttnworldwide.com / TTN-Travel & Tourism News Mikddle East / COVER STORY / posted January 2012
