Tourism got fashionable at the Chic Outlet Shopping® conference at Fitur today. The elite from the fashion and travel worlds came together to discuss how the two industries cross over more and more.
The Tourism Gets Fashionable Panel
There was an elite panel of travel and fashion experts who included:
Sandra del Río is a journalist. At present she is Editor In Chief of Condé Nast Traveler Spain (as of 2006).
James Bidwell – CMO of Value Retail – responsible for the success of all marketing, brand positioning and communication strategies of Value Retail’s family of nine Chic Outlet Shopping® Villages.
Piers Schmidt: Piers is a leading strategic marketing consultant, specialising in luxury and lifestyle brands, especially those with a heavy reliance on service.
Enrique Ruiz de Lera: Currently Director of Spain’s Tourism Board in London. Enrique has more than 13 years experience marketing Spain in 12 countries comprising 3 continents (Europe, America and Asia).
Beatrice d’Orleans: Princess Béatrice d´Orléans works as a a journalist for the prestigious American magazine Women´s Wear Daily and Vogue.
Alejandro Bataller: Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Sha Wellness Clinic.
James Wigan: CEO of Quintessentially Iberia and a true Europhile, and graduated from the École Hotelière de Lausanne, Switzerland.
Shopping can be put into an equation with other factors, which when put together total the luxury experience that retailers are turning into. Products have evolved into brands, and stores into theatres, offering the consumer a completely different experience to just shopping.
The panel pointed out that Georgio Armani has turned the shop itself into as much of an attraction as the clothes within it – which is where more retailers are heading. Shopping is coupled with a spa, concierge service, to make a visit an entire experience for the consumer, beyond the clothes. This puts the brand at the forefront of any shopper, because it transitions from being a place to be visited for one purpose only, and instead has leisure coupled with luxury. Chic Outlet Shopping® will offer a chauffer service for this reason, picking our customers up from their houses and driving them to the nearest shopping Village.
Fashion Designers and Hotels
Key brands mentioned as success stories in the evolutionary process from design houses to hotel businesses were Armani and Bulgari, with the whole panel agreeing that these two brands showed intricacies and individuality in the design of their hotels.
It became apparent that fashion hotels had a flirtation with Dubai, as more and more launched in this futuristic metropolis. This including the Fashion TV hotel, which while still in design phase will have a diamond for a tower (!).
The extremities in the design of a fashion hotel were to offer the consumer an extension of the brand, another way in which the customer can relate to its identity and personality outside of shopping. Princess Beatrice highlighted that a fashion house offers its consumers a lifestyle and a hotel was simply an extension of this. Because of this, it was evident, and agreed by the panel that a visit to a fashion hotel was more than a one-time experience.
If luxury is an endless pursuit of perfection, then perhaps designers moving into tourism was a consolidation of their brands. If a consumer already identifies with a brand, then they would be keen to extend this to staying in the hotel as part of this experience, with the hotel almost acting as a showroom for the brand.
Whether a designer put their stamp on the interior and architecture of the hotel, was entirely down to the individual. Where as Versace were loud and proud with their branding in their hotel, The House of Ferragamo did not push their design credentials too heavily on their hotel.
Tags: Armani, Bulgari, Chic Outlet Shopping®, fashion hotels, Fitur, Luxury, Travel