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Transcript

James: Alright, I think we'll just get started.  Otherwise, the half hour will go very quickly! This is the third in our series about personalizing the guest journey.  (If you haven't already, do have a look at the other two on my LinkedIn profile.) For me, one of the most important things was to bring this discussion back to hotel operations, because that's where the magic happens with guests. It's where the personal touch happens. And when I asked Greg to do this, I just got such a sense of hospitality from him—I know that sounds a bit cliché, but just the pure hospitality spirit in what Greg has done at the W and in his career. I think personalizing the guest journey is something that's really important to him. It's obviously important to the W Edinburgh, but also in his other roles.

So, Greg, we'd love to hear a bit about you, where you've come from, and how you got to the W. We'll talk a little bit about the challenges of opening a brand new luxury hotel in one of the best destinations in the UK, Edinburgh. We'll talk a bit about your tech stack and then how guest preferences have changed. Does that sound good?

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Greg: Absolutely.

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James: Amazing, thank you!  So please do introduce yourself, talk a little bit about where you've come from and how you got to the W.

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Greg: Thank you so much, James. Well, first of all, I feel extremely old when you were introducing me! It just felt like I'm a dinosaur in hospitality.

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James: Definitely not!

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Greg: I try to stay on top of the latest trends. So my name is Greg Bogdan. I am originally from Poland, arrived to the UK about 19 years ago. And I started my career in a very independent, small boutique hotel—140 bedrooms in Central London near London Bridge—and climbed up my career ladder over there and moved to luxury, I think it was 2018. I started working at the Conrad London St. James. And this is where we met a few years back.  Two years ago, I had this fantastic opportunity to change everything and move away from the hustle and bustle of London and start my new life in Edinburgh and open the W Edinburgh. And without hesitation, I have made a choice to change everything. It's very, very different being in Edinburgh compared to being in London, that's for sure.

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James: There are some pluses and minuses of living in a smaller city.

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Greg: But I think for me personally, it's more of a positive change than anything. After living so many years in London and facing the Londoners' challenges day to day, it felt like there was time to make a difference and move away from the hustle and bustle of that city.  But that's about me and about my career. I've been in the hotel rooms division for my entire life and I've been in operations for almost my entire professional career, minus maybe a couple of years working in human resources. And after three years of working in human resources, I decided, "No, I don't want to sit behind the desk." It's lovely to help people, love to help businesses, but I want to face guests. I want to get to know them. I want to interact with them. And I went back to operations and absolutely love it.

The trends do change in hospitality, and we'll talk about technology later, but there's something you cannot take away from interacting with others, and that's the hospitality. It's not the service part, but it's the hospitality part, when you're not serving somebody, but you're there to know them, to learn from them, and take something for yourself from those interactions. And this is really, really important to me.

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James: Yeah, yeah. So just to pick up on that, this was exactly the same reasons that I loved working in operations, because it was so fun, but also that interaction, not only with guests, but also with other staff in the hotel itself. Just a lot of fun, a lot of stress, a lot of really, really hard graft and hard work. But you've just taken me right back, so thank you for that.

That's brilliant. That's a really, really helpful introduction. I think the other thing that would be really helpful is just to talk about the opening of the W. For those that don't know, or haven't been to Edinburgh since it opened, the W is in a really iconic sort of location just beyond Princes Street. It's kind of very close to the new, huge luxury shopping area. But it had its challenges, I think, in terms of the structure of the building and the way that it is. And if you are in Edinburgh, please, please go and see it. It's really close to the station. It has some of the best views in the whole of Edinburgh from the roof.

Greg, coming from the Conrad, obviously in a fantastic location in St. James, to Edinburgh, to that location with a completely different style of hotel, different brand, obviously going from Hilton to Marriott, with a sort of a very different structure of building, just tell us a bit about the W and how the opening was, because again, that can be stressful. Just your experience there would be great to hear about.

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Greg: I have erased that from my memory! No, I'm joking, I'm joking. As you've said, it's a prime location where W Edinburgh is. So, this whole complex of St. James' Quarter was redeveloped, I think, and there's this new lovely shopping center, or a shopping gallery, as we like to call it here. And we are part of that redevelopment of that quarter. And location, as you mentioned, superb, you know, off Princess Street, very close to the railway station, Waverley Rail Station, on the back of Multrees Walk, which is the luxury shopping street for Edinburgh. This whole area, I'm not sure if anyone was here before, it looked like a post-eighties leftover, forgotten about. And because of the location itself, it was really nice that the owners have taken this massive challenge to actually bring it to its glory.

And our hotel itself had some good and bad press before we opened because of the shape of the hotel. But it's a ribbon—for everyone that's wondering, it's a ribbon—it celebrates the festivity of the city. And we have actually three buildings. So the main building, the ribbon building, with fabulous panoramic views of the city, the best in the city. There's no other place in Edinburgh. If the weather is nice, which is very rare in Edinburgh, to what I've experienced so far, but if the weather is nice and you have a lovely cocktail on the 12th floor with the view of the town and the sea in the background, it's just something that no one can take away from you. It feels absolutely amazing.

So that's the ribbon building. We have the Quarter House, which has predominantly our majority of the inventory, and it's attached to the ribbon building. And we have a completely detached townhouse opposite the square that we are located in. And it has 39 bedrooms. The ribbon building itself has 69 bedrooms and all the food and beverage outlets. Sushi Samba partnered with us. On the 10th floor, we have our own W Lounge, on the 11th floor, and obviously W Deck, which is our rooftop with those fantastic views, on the 12th floor.

So as you can imagine, opening a building which is this complex, it is not an easy challenge. So it took a lot of strength, it took a lot of resilience and agility to actually put this project together. We had a fantastic line of support. Me, as one of the main people that started from the operational side, with my other colleagues from the executive committee, we basically just had to put this together and then to bring heart to the building. We've been given a product and then we have to make it the best possible for ourselves, but predominantly for our guests. And I think that we did a really good job, obviously, with the help of the project team.

But it's like you say, "Home is where the walls are," sorry, "House is where the walls are, but home is where the heart is and the family is." And this is what we were trying to implement here. We've been given a fantastic product, but it was down to us to make sure that the product is just complemented to the service that we provide, the hospitality that we provide.

Because we are attached to the shopping center, we have separate receptions. We have actually four different receptions. So the main one from the square, there is one connected to St. James' Center, there is one in the car park, because we have this fantastic car park that's part of the center as well, but we take advantage of. And we have a separate reception for our James Craig Walk building, this townhouse that I've mentioned before. So imagine that, how are you going to put this all together? Guests can come from every single angle and you have to deliver service. Obviously, we've opened the hotel in November, and obviously there was a lot of learnings from us and for us and for the guests, what they like, what the trend is.

And we have established that using this personal connection with the guests. A lot of prep is being done prior to guest arrival, enabled us to actually streamline the arrival process itself. And we're able to move it towards the main two receptions in the building. But yes, technology is also one of the biggest parts of it.

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James: Yeah, so that sort of leads me into... I have a few questions about opening, so I don't want to go through the trauma too much, but just a couple more questions about the opening, I think. So four receptions, four entrances, and again, with really sort of quite equally split room counts in each. I mean, immediately putting my hotel sales hat on, that offers some really interesting opportunities to sell things in different ways and to do other bits and pieces. But operationally, how long did it take you to get from the four down to using the two? And was it a case of, "Let's try a few different bits and pieces and see how it works?" Or did it become quite naturally clear that those were going to be the two main... I mean, obviously the main, the ribbon building, that's always going to be the focal point of the hotel. But how long did it take to get to that point?

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Greg: It wasn't actually long. I think it took us about three months to realise that there are certain areas that we don't really need to focus very much on. So, for instance, to get to our hotel, to the food and beverage outlets, Sushi Samba, W Lounge, or W Deck, you can get from the car park, you can get from the main entrance, or you can get from the center. And we have realized that guests don't use the center entrance very much. They prefer to go walk through the traditional, through the main reception, to just get to the restaurant. So we have basically gave up, gave that part up to, well, I gave that part up to my colleagues from food and beverage, when they could basically just do check-ins for Sushi Samba and W Lounge rather than actually utilizing that space for checking for the guests of the hotel. Because that was a full setup, yes, to do that. We had a full setup to do this in the car park as well. But again, we've discovered that guests don't want to have, like, they don't want to have that experience of checking taken away from them and then just compromise. Yes, it is much faster, you can go straight away to your room from the car park rather than just stopping somewhere else, but they actually wanted to have that experience of, you know, "Let me just sit down in the lobby, have my cup of coffee or a glass of champagne, and then just approach the reception." They wanted to have that experience.

So it was very, very quickly we have realized that those two spaces don't really work. And we predominantly focus on the main one in the reception, in the level four in Quarter House, the main one from the square, and James Craig Walk.

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James: No, so I just, it's always... I always find that when people... the architect will build the, will obviously design the building and build it, but then the operation comes in and has to operate it. It's always, sometimes there's a slight disconnect between these two things in terms of operationally managing it. I think one of the other things, I don't know if you, it's slightly aside, but the other thing that I think is always missing in a new hotel build is storage areas for all the kit that you need to run a hotel because it's like just not thought about. And then it's suddenly, "Oh dear, we now must store all this stuff somewhere." James, my trauma is back!

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Greg: Because you literally, now I completely forgotten about it, so that was a really funny part, because as you've mentioned, you know, new building, "Where is all the storage area?" And we have looked at the plans, "Greg, this is your storage area. This is what you're going to use." And I'm getting my hard hat, vest, I'm going up, no lifts to the 10th floor, ninth floor, and I'm opening the storage and it's full of AC units. And I'm like, "This is supposed to be for housekeeping. What's happening here?" And they forgot to update the drawings. And we had to find alternatives. And now when I think about it, it is funny.

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James: It is funny, definitely.

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Greg: But I wasn't laughing at that time, that's for sure.

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James: Sorry to bring that trauma back. So let's move on a little bit. So interesting. So moving from London to Edinburgh, just talk a little bit about how you think guest preferences and guest interaction has changed over your career. It'd be really interesting to just hear about that. And then we can talk a little bit about technology that you use to address that.

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Greg: Yes. So for the last eight, nine years, I work in luxury. And I think that in luxury, it's a little bit different than premium and select hotels in the way that the client does have those expectations of being served in a more traditional way. There's nothing wrong with that, absolutely the opposite. We love that. This is why we're here. But the tendency has changed. And, you know, when we talk about, you know, not waiting to check out because you can do express checkouts on your phone, for instance, it is becoming a norm. Same with checking in. Even in luxury hotels, you know, you have to facilitate those changes and make sure that you are ahead of the game. Because I think our guests are being more and more impatient. Time is very valuable to them. And, you know, perception of time is as well very different. You know, two minutes at the desk can be felt like seven minutes for them. So we have to be very, very wise about how we're utilizing technology.

And I guess definitely, you know, when I started my career, everything was, you know, you had those manual keys.

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James: Not that old! You had those, I remember them.

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Greg: On my first internship, we had those manual keys. And obviously, this has evolved since. And now you have a direct connect. You can operate your whole room from the comfort of an iPad. It's phenomenal. It's absolutely phenomenal. That convenience, that anticipation of guest needs, it's fantastic. I really look forward to seeing what the future will bring.

And going back to the markets you mentioned, London and Edinburgh are very different markets. Very similar, but very different. And what I had not anticipated is the fact, when moving up here to the North, is that the Edinburgh market is very seasonal. And, for instance, in January and February, the city is very, very quiet. When it starts coming back to life in March until December, obviously with festivals being held during summer, and other activities. But it's a very, very seasonal market and attracts... I'm not sure if it's because of the brand itself, Marriott, but we have a lot of guests from the US, especially the ones that they actually have heritage here in Scotland. This is completely new to me as well. In London, when you were connecting with the guests, they're here to see Westminster or Big Ben. Here, when you connect with the guests, not only are they coming here for the city, for the history of it, but they're coming here to find their roots. And that's really, really interesting.

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James: Yeah, okay. And so just to pick up on a couple of bits there. So would you say, so obviously time, check-in, spent time spent in the hotel, would you say guests are sort of trending more to digital experiences and digital, like using their phone rather than talking to... I think it's difficult. Like, for me personally, I love a good concierge. I love to talk to someone like you when I'm in the hotel. I ask questions, but also there are moments when I go to hotels where I don't have the... you know, maybe it's late or I don't want to talk to someone and I do need that information on the phone. Have you seen it? What's the trend? Are you seeing people more using their phone? I mean, you'll still get Americans who want to talk all afternoon, because I'm the same, I love to talk. But what's the trend do you see?

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Greg: The younger generation of guests will choose digitalization over anything else. And the older generation will do a mix of both. And as you have said, even myself, I would choose to message somebody, if it's like 10 o'clock at night, with my request when I stay in a hotel, rather than making a phone call, because it's easier. And the younger generation, definitely, everything digitalized, everything digitalized. And those interpersonal connections are very, very, very little of them.

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James: Yes.

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Greg: And your platform, it helped us enormously when we opened. It's obviously... W is very different. We like to break the trends and be a standout, show a little bit with certain things. And we didn't have, at the beginning, a typical concierge that would stand behind the desk and talk to the guests about the castle, the castle seat. Everybody was a concierge, but at the same time, the service wasn't very efficient and we needed something else. So, James, I'm not sure if you remember, but when we launched the platform, our usage rates were sky high because guests were really interested. And sometimes, looking at their convenience, the time they were using it—it was 5:00 AM when they were looking at the platform! Maybe because they were leaving for the airport and wanted to check a couple of things, or they had jet lag.

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James: Correct, correct.

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Greg: Or they were going to the Highlands and were trying to plan their day, or a couple of days in advance. That was very, very helpful. And now we have a concierge because, again, we've learned that there is a need for both. Digitalization and hospitality can be merged together, and we can elevate the service. We're using both to elevate the service, rather than just using one instead of the other.

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James: Yeah. So just a couple of things to pick up on there. For me personally, I love that personal touch, but I also like the digital, exactly as you say. And I think having obvlo as an extension of the service means that the fantastic recommendations that your concierge can give can be delivered digitally. It's as simple as that. But it's also, you know, if one of your guests is staying in the townhouse and not directly exposed to the food and beverage outlets that you've got in the amazing ribbon building, I'm sure you do a great job of saying, "Breakfast is here, come and see us," and all these other bits and pieces. But having the ability to push through, you know, those... like your partnership with Sushi Samba, which is an iconic brand, but also for your own food and beverage, to say, "You might have arrived late, do come over for a coffee." It's simple, but it does work for that.

I'm curious about other bits of technology. Which other technologies are you using to interact with guests?

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Greg: Marriott has this fantastic platform called GXP. And through that, there's a lot of planning ahead of the guest's arrival. But at the same time, it enables guests to communicate with the hotel directly, which is fantastic. Because, you know, sometimes when you make a phone call, it's not always a convenient time for me to speak. With this, you can do it anytime, 24/7. You can basically message the hotel and ask for anything. And the same with us; we can message you and ask, "How was your dinner at that restaurant?" And this message can come at 8:00 in the evening, but you'll reply whenever it's convenient for you.

But as well, we have... I'm not sure if I should be advertising this, to be honest, but it's a fantastic tool. And again, talking about technology and convenience of the guest... with Lutron, we have incorporated digitalization of "Do Not Disturb" and "Make Up My Room" or "Service My Room." Guests press the button, and we know we need to go there, or guests press another button and we know we don't have to go there. And that improves utilization of our housekeepers, productivity, and efficiency as well. So from a business point of view, that's really cool. And obviously, we can monitor the time that guests actually ask for service. That's another great tool.

Going back to your platform, the fantastic thing is that we can tailor-make everything for what we feel is right for us. So, James, I'm not sure if you remember when we opened, we had a couple of restaurants or attractions that we didn't want to have...

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James: Yeah, yeah.

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Greg: ...so that was really good that we were able to blacklist the things you don't want and to play up the things you do, and to have partnerships with...

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James: Yeah, it's so important, I think. You know, the W brand... you have other Marriotts in Edinburgh, but being the first W in a city, it has a responsibility.

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Greg: Yes. Because of the nature of W, it has a responsibility.

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James: You know, I work with Stuart a little bit, who does a lot of our onboarding, just to make sure that it reflects your brand and what the W is about. Because again, it's so... I think of some of the other W hotels that are out there, and it is iconic for Marriott. Anytime a new W opens in a city, it's an event. And so it has to be spot on and correct. And so, yeah, it was a great experience working through that with you, just to make sure the branding is correct, the colors are right, the listings reflect what you're trying to put out to a guest. So that branding, when a guest experiences something in the hotel, talking to your staff, and then they receive something digitally, it should all be consistent.

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Greg: Yes. Interestingly, you mentioned that, obviously, by the time we were opening the hotel, the brand was evolving as well. So I'm looking at the background of our meeting room now, this off-white and black color. When I started, there were a lot of screaming neon colors, and now it's all settled. I feel much better with that, to be honest, than with those neon colors, neon green, or orange, and red. So the brand was evolving, and we were one of the first hotels opening at the time that had to adapt, and adapt very quickly, to those things. So from my side, James, thank you so much for enabling that and making sure that this is an extension of our service here at the W. You've done a fantastic job.

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James: Well, thank you so much. We're at time, Greg. So firstly, just thank you so much for sharing your experience. I think... I speak to a lot of other technology providers, but for me, it's so important to get back to the actual operation of the hotel. You're on the front line, you do this every day, and it's so important to hear your viewpoint. So just a huge thank you from me and the rest of the team. And for those watching, please, please go and see Greg at the W. Greg, I'm sorry, you probably get a lot of appointments, but it is such a fantastic hotel, with a really unique structure, fantastic teams, great food and beverage. So go and see it!  Greg, I'd just like to say thank you so much for joining us today. And we'll be in touch soon.

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Greg: Absolutely. James, thank you so much for having me. And, well, we'll definitely speak soon. So thank you again.

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James: Thanks, Greg.

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Greg: Thank you.