Crafting Community: What I Learned At Appellation's Event This Week with Ed Skapinok

Ed: One of the unique things about the brand that we decided early on that we wanted to do was to embrace the local makers and artisans and find a way to make them part of the guest experience. And so we have an immersive learning expert on staff and somebody that is working with us to build out an entire program of immersive learning experiences. Some of these could be informal. We invite a local coffee roaster to come in on a Saturday morning and lead a cupping activity with our guests in the lobby so that they can experience how to taste coffee in different ways. And others are more formal classes, things that we actually have an expert there. We sell tickets to it. Others are also for private event. So that's become quite popular to have, not just corporate team building, although that's been quite popular, but how even on a social group, to be able to do something that's a little more experiential. But the idea is that we have these local tastemakers, these local experts leading these activities. And it's not just visitors that attend them, it's also members of the community, the locals come in. And so we have a catalog of classes and prior to opening any of our hotels, we do pop-up classes in that market. Typically they're at a local winery or someplace that we know and we really feel strongly about, places that we love to support, that we think will be good partners for us even once the hotel is open. But so we lead these pop-up activities and it's a little bit of R&D because we get some feedback about in the absence of a hotel guest, what resonates with the local population, what times of day, what types of classes, just all kinds of feedback that we're getting before opening up the hotels. Our hotels will never look out of place because we do put so much time and attention into designing the buildings, the materials that we source, that everything really reflects the character of that destination. So I think we're a place that people are proud to work. I think that when people stay with us, they feel like they're staying in a conscientious place that understands community, embraces that sense of community, and everything that we do really fits there.

Josiah: Okay, now that you have that context from Ed, I want to tell you about one of these events that I attended this week and my thoughts as a participant. I have photos on our LinkedIn page and some video on the Hospitality Daily YouTube channel if you want to check those out. I'm still working on my photo and video skills, but I think you might enjoy seeing this as opposed to just hearing me talk about it. This event I attended was all about gardening. It's something that I don't do currently at my home in San Francisco, but I used to garden growing up and I'm fascinated by it and hope to garden again someday. So I found this topic really interesting and a few things that I think you might be interested in that stood out to me from coming out of this event First was the senior executive leadership team of Appellation was all there for the event and hands-on in making it happen. Ed was the person greeting us and other participants. Appellation's head of operations, Jennifer Clay, was there. Christopher Hunsberger, Appellation's co-founder and actually the former president of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, was there taking photos. For me as a participant, it was really clear that community building wasn't just about lip service and delegating this to interns and entry-level staff, but it was something that was critically important to this company that they're building. The second takeaway I had was how they partnered with some great local experts. Um, for this event I attended, they worked with a local gardening center, which was staffed by people who clearly knew a lot about growing things. I didn't know how many details and how much work went into just creating great soil. Um, and so I felt like I got a deep dive into that. Uh, I learned a lot about gardening in this, and it was clear that people leading this class were devoting their time, but really their whole lives to this. And so it's really fun to be around and learn from people that get really excited about what they do. So I love the partnership element of this with this business in the local community. And finally, it was just fun. I think sometimes we take events too seriously, and we need to remember to have fun in the process. You know, I think the process for creating fun and events is sometimes a little bit intangible, but I've led teams that have led events and I found it's really a combination of everything that we've discussed here. It's the tone that's set by the hosts and the people in the room, and I feel like the Appellation team did a really good job with all of this. So again, I encourage you to check out some of the photos I took on the Hospitality Daily LinkedIn page. I'm in some video. I'll link to that in the show notes where you can check that out. But overall, I think this was a really powerful example of what community and community building can look like. And it really inspired me to think more expansively about this, both at work and in my personal life. So thanks to Appellation for hosting us. And I'm excited to see more of this. I think this is really hospitality at its best.