W Hotels’ Lessons in Luxury’s Evolution to Meet Global Consumer Expectations

W Hotels sits within the Luxury Group by Marriott International — a portfolio of eight hotel brands including The Ritz-Carlton, Ritz-Carlton Reserve, Bulgari Hotels & Resorts, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts, Edition Hotels, The Luxury Collection and JW Marriott. The brand has a long-standing tenure within the fashion, music and creative communities, with its first property on Lexington Avenue designed to capture the social electricity of New York in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Today, W Hotels is transforming its flagship properties and opening new hotels to grow with its existing, as well as new creative communities across the globe, maturing into a luxury lifestyle brand with a more varied offering. To meet the expectations of today’s luxury traveller, W Hotels is expanding its cultural programming and elevated service, and collaborates with fashion brands, musicians and artists aligned to all global locations.

Its global flagship, W New York Union Square, was recently redesigned by architecture and design firm, the Rockwell Group, to place a stronger emphasis on its public spaces, which play host to the hotel’s music programming, such as the “W Presents” live performance series. In-house professional recording studios and an involvement in global music festivals further enhance the cultural offerings for the brand’s creative community. At the newly opened W Budapest, the hotel partnered with luxury Hungarian brand Nanushka to create an exclusive collection during Budapest Central European Fashion Week, displayed in the hotel’s lobby.

The hotel brand is also meeting its community in new locations — a strategic move, considering over half of the respondents to BoF and McKinsey’s consumer survey in The State of Fashion 2024 report said they are seeking destinations they haven’t visited before, underscoring this community’s desire for new experiences.

The hotels’ new properties include W Rome, which opened in 2021, W Budapest and W Sydney, which opened in 2023 — three locations identified as cultural hotspots to which its community gravitates. W São Paulo, W Prague and W Punta Cana are to follow shortly, while W Hotels continues to consolidate its identity in North America, unveiling the newly transformed W Hollywood this autumn, which serves as the brand’s West Coast flagship. W Hotels now counts 68 hotels across 29 countries globally, with an additional 38 in the pipeline.

The brand evolution is well-timed: global travel has bounced back, with 2024 being the first year since the outbreak of Covid-19 that global travel flows are expected to surpass pre-pandemic levels, according to The State of Fashion 2024 report. The shift in values that the pandemic brought about has also encouraged consumers to prioritise experiences over material goods, according to a poll from Barclays, and increased “workation” travel, a term denoting the combination of travel for both business and leisure.

Now, BoF sits down with George Fleck, senior vice president and global brand leader of W Hotels, formally global brand leader for the St. Regis, to understand more about the brand’s mission to learn from and grow with their core clientele.

What does your clientele expect of W Hotels as a luxury brand today?

When W Hotels was first conceptualised in the late 90s in New York City, it was designed to be this disruptive lifestyle brand that was focused on a buzzy and vibrant lobby and bar scene — the focus wasn’t so much to have it positioned as a true luxury offering.

Over the last three decades, we have worked to reposition the brand, to elevate it to become a global luxury lifestyle brand. We are still maintaining all those elements that offer a sense of modernity — around design, product, the playful and fun programming, activations and collaborations — but layered with a luxury experience.

That luxury experience is reflected in the materiality of the space; the amenities; the facilities in the hotel; and, most importantly, an anticipatory and flawless service. Our customer today views this service as a baseline, especially in a post-pandemic world where consumers are known for wanting style but also the substance behind that. We can’t just be a beautiful hotel — we also need to have that attention to detail and all the different layers of service that make the experience of staying with us memorable.

How is W Hotels evolving its offering to meet consumer needs?

Customers today are looking for authenticity. They have so many hotel brands to choose from, in every segment, at every price point, so what really sticks? What do guests remember the most? A comfortable bed, nice room service or a great minibar are all table stakes.

We look at the totality of the guest experience. For example, we have evolved the traditional role of the concierge to position them as a next generation insider, offering a personalised service connecting guests to experiences in the hotel to drive differentiation.

We are also leveraging social media platforms in terms of how we communicate with our guests, because people no longer pick up the phone and call the hotel to find out what’s available — they go on their favourite social channels to learn about destinations and people they love who have been there. We were actually one of the first hotel brands to launch an integrated TikTok strategy, so we are able to communicate with target audiences using non-traditional media — and we have seen positive results.

We are also ensuring that all of our talent in those hotels are upskilled to match these consumer expectations — employees undergo luxury service training because we don’t want our guests to feel that this brand evolution is simply a product facelift.

How do you strategically balance retaining your former clientele and appealing to a new one?

I recently spoke to a customer who has frequently stayed at our Union Square property, pretty much since it opened. She spoke fondly about how, when she first started travelling to New York and eventually moved here, she remembers having the most amazing experiences at W New York – Union Square, like seeing Boy George performing in the Underbar.

Employees undergo luxury service training because we don’t want our guests to feel that this brand evolution is simply a product facelift.

Fast-forward to now, she’s working as an executive and has a different appreciation for different experiences. She has a different income. But, she still wants to be in a hotel where she feels like she’s going to have a good time — a place where there’s energy and vibrancy, without compromising on those matured expectations or the service experience.

So, with the evolution, we’re not losing that fun and playful point of view, we’re just making sure that all of those other parts of the experience that make it luxurious are met.

What do younger generations expect from luxury lifestyle brands today?

We know that this customer or target audience — Gen-Z and Millennials — is all about creating stronger connections, both offline and online. They don’t want to be served up a beautiful marketing campaign if it doesn’t correspond to the experience — they can see through it.

We know that this customer wants to do business with brands that also do good for the communities that they operate in, so we are partnering with relevant parties that meet that expectation. For example, we recently collaborated with an organisation called Femme House — a non-profit aimed at creating opportunities for women and gender-expansive LGBTQ+ creators in the music industry. It was actually founded by LP Giobbi, W Hotels’ global music director.

As a brand, it is easy to sponsor a charity, but it is harder to create meaningful community connections by providing opportunities with the art that they want to create. So, we hosted our first Femme House workshop in W Seattle a few weeks ago, which was an incredible opportunity to spotlight creativity and use W Hotels as a way to incubate this talent in a meaningful way.

How is W Hotels integrating collaborations with fashion brands into the hospitality experience?

We have always collaborated with fashion designers and often emerging talent — back in 2011, we partnered with the CFDA. But recently, our approach is to work with local brands. For example, at W Budapest, we brought in renowned Hungarian brand Nanushka to create an exclusive capsule collection inspired by the local culture and history, because if you’re travelling to Budapest from London or New York, we don’t want you to find the same pieces that you could buy in London or New York by the same brands.

Gen-Z and Millennials don’t want to be served up a beautiful marketing campaign if it doesn’t correspond to the experience — they can see through it.

Another collaboration we are doing for a second year is our partnership with Sunchasers, an LA-based unisex clothing brand. We have launched a capsule collection in W South Beach and W Ibiza, which is a hand-dyed collection produced with a creative and artistic approach, to match the bohemian glamour of these summer destinations and our hotels. Then, we did a pop-up for a winter or ski collection with Valentino at W Aspen last season too.

What excites you about the future of W Hotels?

We recently opened a location in Sydney, which is our third property in Australia. That gives us a nice trifecta of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, with some strong product and service experiences included in all three.

Another chapter for the brand I’m looking forward to is our entrance into the all-inclusive space, which we are doing with W Punta Cana. We’re entering a market where the brand needs to focus on the music and entertainment aspect as well as wellness; on amazing food and beverages; on experiences, so it’s been fun to work on what we can do to bring that vibe to an adult all-inclusive space.

Finally, in Europe, I’m excited about our expansion in Italy. We have an amazing property with W Rome and we are opening W Florence, W Milan and W Naples. Having those W Hotels properties across Italy and the products and experiences they offer is going to create great excitement for European customers.

This is a sponsored feature paid for by W Hotels as part of a BoF partnership.