Press Room
You Are Where You Sleep Chip Conley: Joie de Vivre's CEO talks about the boutique advantage for meeting professionals
In 1987 26-year-old Chip Conley, who had no previous experience in the hospitality industry, bought a faded, down-at-the-heels hotel called the Phoenix in San Francisco's seedy Tenderloin district and transformed it into the must-stay-at spot in the city for a small but highly visible market niche: touring rock and roll bands. Conley became one of the pioneers in the boutique industry.
Joie de Vivre is now a chain of 28 boutique properties, including the 210-room Hotel Angeleno, which opened in early June in a former Holiday Inn in the Bel-Air/Brentwood area of Los Angeles. The hallmarks of a Joie de Vivre property are style, personality and service: "You are where you sleep," Conley says. The hotels range from the scholarly, bookish Hotel Rex to the classically elegant Nob Hill Lambourne, both in San Francisco (the chain operates 18 San Francisco boutique hotels, in fact), to the beautiful half-timbered Harvest Inn in the Napa Valley to the Renaissance Revival style of the Hotel Montgomery in San Jose. The White Swan Inn is an "English Garden Inn" in San Francisco's Nob Hill, with a fireplace in every room; the Hotel Los Gatos and Spa adjacent to Silicon Valley is styled as a Mediterranean villa. There are as many themes and concepts as there are Joie de Vivre properties.
Conley has not forgotten his roots, however; the Phoenix still hosts rock and roll bands as well as the annual Celebrity Pool Toss fund-raiser. (He also became the foster parent of a Tenderloin teenager, now a successful 28-year-old.) The author of The Rebel Rules: Daring to be Yourself in Business, published by Simon & Schuster in 2001, Conley spoke with Smart Meetings just as the Hotel Angeleno prepared to open.
What do boutique hotels offer meeting professionals that larger hotels don't?
Since boutique hotels have less meeting space, a group at a boutique hotel is taking over the whole meeting function at the hotel. And that's nice, it means you get the full attention of the meeting staff and the catering staff. It means you have a sense of autonomy as opposed to being in a big hotel, where there may be seven meetings going on at the same time and you can get lost or swallowed up. In a boutique-style hotel, I think people feel that it's almost like a retreat. It's like their hotel.
The boutique hotel concept dates back to just the mid-1980s, but it has really gained some momentum in the past few years. What kind of trends are you observing in the hotel business now that follow up on the boutique hotel phenomenon?
What's most interesting is that the big chains are now getting into the boutique business – Starwood with W a dozen years ago, and now Intercontinental with Indigo and the Hyatt with Hyatt Place. Starwood is creating a new brand called Aloft, which is a three-star boutique brand. I thinks that's now recognized by the big chains is that there's a large segment of the population looking for experience-driven, personalized hospitality. The chains are really good at predictability and consistency, but a certain kind of customer out there is looking for something that's got a little more unique flafor to it both in terms of the style of the hotel and also how service is delivered. So I think the biggest trend I see is the fact that what was at one time the "rebel hotel" idea has now gotten embraced by the biggest hotel companies in the world.
With larger chains getting into the boutique business, what will existing boutiques need to do to remain distinguished from big-chain small hotels?
The reason people stay in boutique hotels is because they build a deep relationship with the people at the hotel, especially if they're a regular customer. Our employee turnover rate as a company is about 25 percent, where the industry average is about 100 percent. That means our employees stay with us four times longer than what's typical in the industry. That kind of employee loyalty creates customer loyalty. And I think smaller boutique companies have a better chance of creating employee loyalty because they're like small family businesses.
Your properties are notable for their character and personality, so you've hosted some interesting meetings over the years. What are some of the most unusual meetings you can recall at Joie de Vivre Hotels?
There have been some wild ones! We had a weeklong meeting at the Phoenix once called Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp," which was business executives all coming together for a week of team-building. They created a series of rock bands and had a Battle of the Bands contest at the end of the week. That was pretty unusial! We've also had a lot of groups do either a scavenger hunt or treasure hunt in San Francisco as part of the meeting experience. One of the nice things about having an urban meeting is that you actually can connect with the neighborhoo and whith what's around you. We had a meeting at one of our hotels where the meeting participants held a funeral – a funeral for the company. It was on the way down, and they said, "We're not ready to die, but we want to know what it's going to feel like if we did die, and then we want to resurrect ourselves." That's an interesting approach!
What's on the planning hoard at Joie de Vivre these days?
We have a lot! We recently took over the Miyako Hotel and the Miyako Hotel has 13,000 sq. ft. of meeting space, so we're very excited about that; it's a great meetings hotel. We're building a hotel in Huntington Beach on the Pacific Coast Highway right across from the beach; that will be finished in early '08. We are creating a hotel out of a historic office building in downtown Sacramento; Sacramento's a market that has really needed a boutique hotel for a long time.
