Ramón Aragonés, CEO, NH Hotel Group, regards bleisure – the blend of business and leisure – as one of the areas set to grow in the hotel sector post-COVID. He reveals more on this subject, and on how his company is planning to grow ahead of IHIF in Berlin on 3-5 May.
Hospitality Insights: Beyond recovery, what do you view as the major changes in the hospitality sector in 2022?
Ramón Aragonés: The pandemic has accelerated structural business model changes that some companies began to implement much earlier. These were related to digitalisation and automation, with organisational systems and, obviously, with new protocols capable of maximizing health and safety, social distancing and interaction with customers. Two years later, with these changes in place, we are in a second phase of developments, now directly related to changes in customer habits and preferences.
In this time, customers have become used to remote and hybrid working formats where the differences between work, travel and leisure are blurred. In the hotel sector, bleisure, or the combination of business and leisure travel, is the natural response to this new working models. So far it has become the main attraction for domestic tourism, and in the short and medium term, it will also be the main attraction for international travel.
Remote work allows extending holidays, a better conciliation or work and family time, combining a business trip with the family and making the most of free time, facilitates disconnection from work and reduces anxiety and work-related stress. This means that it is no longer necessary to wait for the summer to take a getaway, which has many advantages, including the seasonal adjustment of the industry.
Bleisure is especially attractive for emblematic urban destinations, with good locations, a distinctive gastronomic offer and relevance in the upscale, upper-upscale and luxury categories. For NH Hotel Group this is excellent news, because it is perfectly in line with our combined offer of urban and leisure destinations. These new tourists are going to demand maximum security, which implies the best digital attention. They are more sophisticated, more demanding and want to turn each trip into a unique experience.
Hospitality Insights: How have your responded to the changes in the relations between owners and operators, and what are the most positive long-lasting effect for the sector?
Aragonés: In our case, there is an opportunity for development together with investment funds. We already collaborate with them in many of the hotels where we lease, a model that NH has invested heavily in the past. There is an important process of sectoral concentration. Many small companies are being acquired by these funds. They look for trusted managers, whom they already know and recognise as specialists in certain types of hotels. There is where NH has important opportunity in the future. With the investment funds more active in the market nowadays, some of them private equity profile, we are growing through management agreements, so we are balancing our portfolio also in terms of contracts.
Now that the hotel market is tending towards concentration, we have the advantage of having internalised this model with Minor International as main shareholder since 2018. This operation has given us added stability at the most difficult time of the pandemic, as well as the advantage of having a well-defined, established and efficient international strategy. In 2020 we started our plan to launch the Anantara brand in Europe, to make the leap into the luxury segment.
Minor is one of the world's leading experts in the segment and wanted to develop its most relevant brand in Europe. We already had one Anantara hotel in Algarve: Anantara Vilamoura, opened one in Marbella: Anantara Villa Padierna Palace, and will have another 5 ready in 2022 after some refurbishments, adapting them to all the brand's standards and incorporating all the features and experiences it offers:
Anantara New York Palace Budapest
Anantara Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky Amsterdam
Anantara Palazzo Naiadi Roma
The Marker Hotel in Dublin
Anantara Plaza Nice Hotel
Hospitality Insights: What regions or countries do you see as having the biggest potential for growth?
Aragonés: We are noticing that leisure and bleisure destinations are the ones that are recovering the fastest and that 100% corporate or MICE hotels will take a little longer and some will have to reinvent themselves.
At an international level, and according to data from the World Tourism Organization, Europe and the Americas show the greatest recovery in international arrivals compared to 2021, although they still only represent half of the pre- pandemic figures. The evolution is very favourable throughout Western Europe, especially the southern Mediterranean, in the Caribbean, in the Middle East and in Africa. The Asia-Pacific zone continues to lag behind, and its possible reincorporation into international circuits would make it possible to generalize international passenger traffic fairly quickly.
At NH, we are making a special focus on growing in vacational product in southern Europe (mainly Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece), destinations in which we have great confidence, while we continue growing in the main European capitals.
Hospitality Insights: How can the hospitality sector use technology to improve profitability, sustainability and the guest experience?
Aragonés: The pandemic has caused the biggest crisis of our lives, but it has also helped us change the perspective on the way we work. Teleworking, flexibility and innovation have made their way as work practices. They have shown that companies themselves have the people, technology and systems to adapt to each situation and each environment. If we refer to the tourism field, promoting talent requires us to focus more on quality, and develop as much as possible the qualitative aspects of the work of our professionals and our services offer.
The hotels of the new normality are going to have an aspirational factor, almost as important as the city to which you want to go. This can only be achieved through the talent in each hotel and with a differentiated digital offer. New experiences must be offered, increasingly integrated with the essence of each city. When choosing one destination or another, it is increasingly important to also have a hotel that attracts attention or arouses the interest of the customer.
Technology and innovation will be equally decisive. The digital transformation has been completed and is consolidated. Now it is a matter of making the most of big data, digitally dialoguing with each client, learning from them, anticipating their tastes and offering them the best option at all times, always in the easiest, most agile, personalized and attractive way. In addition, the client has become more of a citizen than ever, demanding where he goes the same commitment he maintains in his daily life. Both in the work of professionals and in the values they embody. It demands respect for the environment, sustainability, good practices, responsibility, solidarity and empathy. Only respectful, conscientious, and transparent hoteliers, capable of sharing values with their clients, will be able to ride this responsible wave.
Ramón Aragonés will join a panel on The New Leisure on Thursday 5th May at IHIF. View the full conference programme here.