5 Key Traits of Perfect Luxury Hospitality Employees

[caption id="attachment_69931" align="alignright" width="350"] "catering operator," Creative Commons license. | Credit: Flickr by www.audio-luci-store.it[/caption] Luxury travel and hospitality success often feels like a subjective formula. But there are five key factors in successful hospitality businesses’ employees, which marketers can pinpoint with this guide. So says luxury travel journalist Laura Powell in Skift, a travel and hospitality site. Her article, published on Dec. 5, says hiring managers for luxury travel and hospitality brands need to look for certain psychographic factors. This may be especially important now, as most travelers — even luxury trip-takers — are searching for the best experiences digitally, and often reading online reviews during their research. In an article published on the same day in Skift, Samantha Shankman writes in “Luxury Brands Embrace Experiential Marketing to Stay Relevant” that: Louis XIII Cognac’s most recent activation is a great example of how luxury brands are aligning with meaningful causes and influencers to appeal to luxury consumers’ growing desire to feel their purchases are part of something bigger than themselves. Similarly, in the Aug. 29 piece by Greg Oates, “The 6 Big Trends That Are Reshaping Luxury Travel,” he says: In the luxury travel space, at a macro level, demand is growing for the accumulation of travel memories drawn from transformative moments that resonate deeply with the individual traveler’s ideal of personal fulfillment, and his or her best aspirational version of themselves. Powell sought out information from employee assessment company Talent Plus that works with brands like Aman, Langham Hotels & Resorts, Capella Hotel Group and KSL Resorts. That company told her that there are certain signs that a possible hire takes joy in serving others — innate traits that aren’t trainable. Here are the five traits Powell advises luxury travel and hospitality brands test for in employees: Drives and Values — the internal motivation to develop and the inner principles that a person lives by; Work Style — how a person fulfills the job responsibilities. Are they focused? Are they perfectionists? What is their process? People Acumen — how a person builds relationships with others and how others perceive those relationships; Influencing Process — the ability to get people to do something or to work toward a common goal; and Thought Acumen — is the person curious? Do they want to learn? How innovative are they and can they apply knowledge and ideas to the workplace? This checklist may yield luxury travel and hospitality staffers who can help today’s travelers create lifelong memories that endear them to your brand. This may be especially helpful during an era in which U.S. travel marketers are saying politics and federal policies, even as a strong dollar and “economic weakness in certain large inbound source markets, like Brazil,” are making a dent in tourism revenue, according to a Dec. 6 article in Travel Weekly titled “Tourism Slump a Concern, Even If It's Not All About Trump.” What do you think, marketers? Is this the formula for success in the experiential marketing space? Please respond in the comments section below.

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5 Key Traits of Perfect Luxury Hospitality Employees

Heather Fletcher

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Heather Fletcher