Luxury Has a Sameness Problem

You frequently come across certain words in luxury hospitality. Timeless. Authentic. Curated. Experiences are unforgettable, service is intuitive, and destinations are invariably full of hidden gems waiting to be discovered.

Look across luxury hotel websites, newsletters and social feeds, and it can be surprisingly difficult to tell one brand from another. The photography changes, as does the destination, but the language often feels remarkably familiar.

Somewhere along the way, luxury hospitality developed a sameness problem.

The great convergence of luxury

It isn't difficult to see how we got here. Luxury hospitality has spent decades developing a visual language of its own. Certain signals tell us immediately where we are: beautiful photography, generous white space, restrained typography, immaculate interiors and, increasingly, a woman in a linen dress walking away from the camera.

The language has evolved alongside it. As luxury brands have grown more global, the way they communicate has become more carefully defined. Brand guidelines now cover everything from vocabulary to tone of voice, creating a common thread across hotels, countries and channels.

Travellers, meanwhile, have become more interested in the character of a place. They want the restaurant around the corner where the owner still knows everyone by name, the swimming spot locals disappear to in August, or just to understand why one neighbourhood feels completely different from the next. These are often the details that stay with us after a trip.

Hotels are surrounded by this material. They sit in places with their own history and rhythms, with access to people and stories most travellers would struggle to find on their own. The more of that world that makes its way into the language, the more a hotel begins to sound like somewhere you might actually want to go.

Florence should sound like Florence

Imagine removing the hotel name and destination from a piece of copy. Could you still tell where you were?

It's a useful test, and the answer can be revealing.

A hotel in Florence should sound different from a hotel in London, but there should also be room for two hotels in Florence to sound different from each other.

One might draw heavily on the city's Renaissance history, while another has a closer relationship with its contemporary art scene. A hotel overlooking the Arno experiences Florence differently from one tucked into a residential neighbourhood. Even properties belonging to the same group have their own relationship with the city around them, shaped by the building, the people who work there and the life happening outside the door.

For a global hotel brand, there is always a balance to strike. The name above the door carries certain expectations, and its values should travel from one property to the next. But consistency isn't the same thing as uniformity. The strongest brands create a framework sturdy enough to hold very different personalities inside it.

Pick up a great magazine and its point of view runs through every page, but an article about a restaurant in Naples doesn't read like an interview with an architect in Copenhagen. Different subjects demand different treatment. What holds it together is an editorial sensibility rather than a shared collection of adjectives.

There is something in that for hotels.

Perhaps we have become too afraid of being specific

Luxury's desire to appeal broadly can start to work against it. In trying to leave room for everyone, brands can end up saying very little about who they are.

Specificity asks a little more of the writer, and of the brand too. Calling a restaurant “exceptional” leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Telling me that the chef still uses his grandmother's battered pasta machine gives me something I can picture.

The same is true of experiences. “Unforgettable” tells me how I'm expected to feel. A morning spent with a Florentine artisan, learning a technique his family has practised since 1904, gives me a reason to feel it.

Luxury content is full of words that describe an emotional response: serene, inspired, indulgent, transportive. The details do far more of the work. The sound from the piazza below your room, the bartender who has been behind the same bar for 30 years, the sketchbook waiting on the desk because Florence is a city that makes you want to draw.

Character comes from those details. The more specific the story, the harder it becomes to mistake it for somebody else's.

Place is an unfair advantage

Hotels have something most brands would kill for: a physical place. A building with a history, a street outside the door and people who know it intimately. There are regulars, long-standing suppliers and stories that have accumulated over years. Even the smallest details can say something: the table everyone wants at breakfast, or the room with the slightly awkward balcony that also happens to have the best view in the building.

For anyone creating content, this is extraordinary raw material. Yet it is easy to race past it in pursuit of a more familiar idea of what luxury is supposed to look and sound like.

For a long time, luxury hospitality was partly about separation from the world outside. The marble lobby, hushed dining room and perfectly pressed sheets created a world apart. Today, much of the appeal of luxury travel lies in access to the world beyond the hotel: the people worth meeting, places worth knowing about and the sort of local knowledge that would take a visitor much longer to find for themselves.

Hotels are unusually well placed to provide that access. They are part of a neighbourhood, rather than just somewhere to stay within it, and the best have relationships with their surroundings that have developed over decades.

There is an enormous amount to write about before anyone needs to reach for the word timeless.

Stop trying to sound luxurious

Luxury has developed its own vocabulary, but some of the most interesting luxury brands don't sound especially “luxurious” at all.

Their content can be funny, curious, opinionated or surprisingly practical. It can tell you that the restaurant everyone queues for isn't worth the wait, and where to go instead. It can spend 600 words on a single painting in the lobby because there happens to be a brilliant story behind it.

It can also have taste. Real editorial judgement means choosing what deserves attention and having a view on it. A hotel doesn't need to tell every story available to it, or appeal to every person who might conceivably stay there.

When every destination is extraordinary, every experience unforgettable and every neighbourhood authentic, it becomes difficult to know what a brand actually finds interesting.

There is usually far better material close at hand: the bartender with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the city, the painting everyone walks past without knowing who painted it, the restaurant three streets away that doesn't appear on every “best of” list. These are the details people remember, and often the ones they repeat to someone else.

If you can remove the hotel name from the top of the page and replace it with another, the problem probably goes deeper than tone of voice.