CoralTree Hospitality on Luxury, Humanity, and the Power of Personal Connection

Glenn: Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality. Friend Glenn here. The hospitality show in Denver, Colorado. I got Mike Everett with me, EVP over at Coraltree. But first, I want to thank my sponsors over at Axonify hiring guest experiences through frontline teams. Please check them out at axonify.com. One of the cool things that I think you’re well positioned for right now is you’ve got a lot of great boutique resort type properties in that upper scale market. It seems like you have a lot of opportunity to get closer to the customer and grow in this topsy turvy market.

Mike: Yeah, it’s a topsy turvy, is a good is a good term for it. And I yeah, our our portfolio is diversified going from Hawaii to South Florida to Boston. We are in. Yeah we’re we’re about 85% independent. We are very leisure focused group oriented in the, in the destination markets that we’re in. And so having having the opportunity to communicate with the guest, whether that could be through technology, that could be with how our frontline associates are talking to them how we’re interacting throughout a 3 or 4 night stay is a way for us to differentiate today against maybe some of the brands that are out there, or some more of the commoditized product that we that we compete against.

Glenn: All right. So you got me thinking. One of one of my mantras for the last year is we got to keep the humanity in hospitality. You’ve heard me say it billions of times right now. I love the idea of empowering your teammates to to get with the customers. Right. Because I’m a big believer in you. Remember as a guest the people that you connect with on property, you can have the greatest property in the world, but no one’s going to come home and say, you got to go to this place because of the lamp, right? It’s always the person.

Mike: Yeah. Or it’s it’s not the app that you communicated with during your stay. It’s the person at the front desk who went above and beyond to give you a service experience.

Glenn: But you need the app to remove friction and address certain service things at certain times.

Mike: We we need the app we need we need AI as as one example, to make our employees jobs easier to take away a lot of the redundancy to streamline communication. But at the end of the day, someone paying $1,000 a night at a hotel or one of our resorts in Hawaii, California, South Florida, they need and want that personal interaction. And the more empowered that person is to provide a great experience, the more likely we’re going to outperform from a service standpoint.

Glenn: I firmly believe. You’ll tell me if I’m wrong because you’re the expert in this, but at that higher end of the market, particularly when you’re talking $1,000 plus a night, that human interaction is absolutely everything. Because if you could afford that kind of money, you already had everything. So you can’t really compete on things. You have to compete on service and experience.

Mike: Exactly, exactly. And I think as, as the as the world becomes more, I’ll say, detached with as much communication as we have, as automated as things are, you know, we’re seeing this this I’ll say, reversion back to the basics of hospitality, which are actually now the most challenging pieces of hospitality is how how people interact, the the personality that they bring to an interaction and the way that they can support a guest to be there for a guest. Those skills are starting to be lost in a lot of parts of our and many parts of our business. And it’s our job, especially at the higher end, like you said, to bring to bring that level of personalization, that level of service back so that we can we can continue to drive the performance that we’re driving.

Glenn: And I can imagine it’s getting a little bit more challenging. Find the right personalities because we’re in now our first real generation of digital natives. That’s generation Z, that’s entering the workforce in a lot of places right now. And getting those entry level jobs, being that they’ve interacted with the computer screen, that that person to person touch, you might have to train them in a little bit different way and think about that in different ways you would with somebody who’s 20 years older.

Mike: Absolutely. We and and we we must use technology to help train that that that next generation. We also see that providing multiple opportunities for them to be providing experiences throughout a property that might, you know, we might might be looking for someone who’s a Swiss Army knife, right? Wants to be at the front desk, who might want to be in a restaurant, but certainly will want to grow their career through different parts of the hotel, giving them the giving them optionality and providing the employee different experiences is critical to.

Glenn: Yeah, I absolutely love it. I think you nailed it. Thanks so much for talking to me. Thanks for watching all the way end. And as a reward like share, subscribe this video, give us some love and thank you for being here. See you later. Bye.