How One Luxury Hotel Brand Partnered with a Fragrance Fiend for Fun, Fame and Fortune
Rosewood Hotels, operators of some of the world’s finest lodgings, teamed up with Chandler Burr, perhaps the world’s only – or at least best known – Scent Critic. Burr, a regular contributor to The New York Times and author of “The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession and the Last Mystery of the Senses,” to create a series of Scent Dinners at its properties.
A sampling: at New York’s legendary The Carlyle, Burr paired
freshly baked bread with a perfume from a niche Parisian house called
Bois Farine, with a whiff of baking flour. A sake was paired with the
perfume Sake from Fresh – you get the picture, or rather the scent.
During the dinner, Burr might ask guests to identify an aroma; or ask
“What food could be in this legendary perfume?”
Since that redolent debut, Rosewood has held more Scent Dinners
around the country. At the Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe,, the
property sold out 30 seats at $140 per seat, plus tax and tip. The
price was even higher at the brand’s Los Cabos and Dallas properties.
While the dinners may not produce huge revenues, the payoff in publicity has been spectacular.
We began our recent report on ‘Family Travel Rising’ with the following:
“All the evidence -- whether you are looking at the Amex-Harrison Group study we reviewed in our last issue, or the Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluence Report completed in September, -- shows Family First when it comes to disposable dollars.
We believe family focus is going to be front of mind for a long time to come, long after the punishing economic climate has subsided. Provider brands will be hard pressed to provide much more than kiddie or junior, or young adult activities. Smart travel agents will have to rise to higher levels of creativity and performance on the family front to sustain customer loyalty and earn the benefits of word of mouth in the neighborhood.”
And last week we caught our favorite global traveler-editor-writer-commentator during a quiet moment at home in England, the home of The Gostelow Report. She shared these thoughts:
• The hotel industry has been very slow to realize that this big expansion in family travel was going to happen. We’ve had “connecting rooms and you can put the kids next door”. They moved on to two swimming pools rather than one. One was kid friendly and one was not. But we really haven’t had anything more than that.
• We are seeing more and more bigger family groups. Operators are having a real challenge coping with such groups because it’s not a group per se, but they form their own groups. They want to be private. They want their own thing. .They tend to do their own excursions. They suddenly want a bus to take them all out. So it’s a real, real challenge. And so far the hotel industry has not realized this is happening. Now, it’s not only families. We’re also seeing more and more groups of friends traveling. And the hotel industry is not incentivizing enough – say a pair of DINKs come- Double-Income-No-Kids. There’s no incentive to them at the moment to bring along two other friends or even four other friends. And there’s big potential on the marketing side there.
Everybody knows her, but her bio is worth repeating.
Mary Gostelow, president of Gostelow Travel: Hottest Hospitality News Worldwide, is an inveterate traveler on the road more than 300 days a year. She owns and publishes the definitive Gostelow Reports, monthly market intelligence briefings to the top levels of the hospitality industry. She is the editor of KIWI's online Wow! Magazine, and also sends out a monthly update to top travel professionals worldwide.
At the same time, she is contributing editor to such publications as Elite Traveler, enRoute, Hotels and Le Magazine.
Nat Ives, in Ad Age Online Sept 6, cites new data from Ipsos MMR which assures that well-off readers read print publications just as much now as they did 5 years ago.
Also, survey respondents making more than $100,000 annually said their average hours online had grown to 22.1 each week from 10.7, while the time they said they spent watching TV sunk to 18.6 hours from 23.7 in the 2003 survey. Read the full Ives story at http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=130685. Lux 360 attended the client briefing this week and will provide additional perspective in our Sept. 30 issue, interviewing Ipsos MMR President Bob Shullman.
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