Delivering Luxurious Hospitality - Denise Dupré, Champagne Hospitality

Whether you work in luxury hospitality or not, the lessons you'll learn from our guests today will inspire you to level up and delight the people you serve. Today we're learning from Denise Dupree, the founder and managing partner of Champagne Hospitality, which develops, owns, and operates luxury properties around the world. In this episode, you're going to learn all about designing and delivering remarkable hospitality experiences, and, to provide some context, Denise shared a little of her story to kick us off.

My story goes way back because I grew up in a family hotel business. It actually was a combination ski area, a year-round resort in western Pennsylvania, started by my grandparents who were immigrants from Europe, So it's sort of an American dream story. So I grew up working from the age of 10 and did a whole series of jobs and operations and was lucky enough in my schooling to also go to the Cornell Hotel School along the way. So I had some professional experience and had a bunch of just terrific, both public and private assignments. I did some consulting work for one of the at the time largest consulting groups in the country in hospitality, as well as some focus on marketing, which is really the subspecialty that I've spent most of my time in.

Fantastic. Tell me a little bit about your collection of hotels. Tell me about Champagne Hospitality and your business.

Well, I hope that the very name Champagne Hospitality provokes bubbles for you and celebration.

It does.

It's a two-fold piece. We do work in the luxury boutique section. We care very much about creating experiences that bring smiles to people's faces. The other piece of it is actually our hotels are located, some of them in wine regions, particularly in France, so there really is a wine hotel connection to our collection as well. So we like to think of trying to create experiences for people that feel like that feeling when you pop a Champagne cork. One of our hotels is one to say make it pop as part of our mantra for the team when they come to work every day.

I like that. I like talking to my guests about what is remarkable hospitality, and I think making it pop is a great descriptor of that. Does anything else come to mind in terms of when you think about remarkable hospitality? What does that look like? What does?

that feel like You know, when you get that unsolicited wow from someone like they really and sometimes they don't use the word but it hits them straight to the heart, like you do something unexpected, that anticipates something that they need, or comes to the rescue or goes above and beyond And I think some of that is really being a good listener. One of the things we train our teams to do is to really listen for what people want, what they want to experience, and to ask the questions in the right way and at the right time. You know, i've often said to my team if you ask someone at the end of a restaurant meal, for example, how was everything? They're probably trying to get out the door you're probably going to hear, oh, just fine. When you hear, oh, just fine, stop rewind, you didn't ask a question that got someone to tell you more about the experience and you probably didn't ask at the right time. So I think part of wow hospitality, part of this experience you're poking at, is being a really good listener and asking people in the right way at the right time how you can create amazing experiences for them.

Both are important, right Right way, right time. Do you have any favorite questions to use when that are a little more thoughtful around understanding how someone experienced one of your properties?

Yeah, i think some of it is looking for what you think happened and then testing it. If you feel like someone really enjoyed a bottle of wine and the celebration was really going well, even if people don't know a lot about wine, if you say, wow, this seems like it's been a great evening for you. Did you enjoy the wine? How did you think it went with the food? Give questions that are easy for anyone to answer and they'll come back to you at the level that they're comfortable with. So someone who knows a lot about wine is going to give you very specific kinds of things. Someone who doesn't can still answer the question because to them it was a great bottle of wine, because it tastes great with their food. That's enough. And I often say to my teens what is a great bottle of wine? Well, a great bottle of wine is whatever that person ordered, that they thought just made them happy and that they thought it tasted great. It doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have to be anything more than just what they wanted.

I love that. I'm curious have you experienced hospitality recently that stands out to you as being remarkable? It could be a big thing, could be a small thing, but what's a recent great hospitality experience that you've experienced?

Well, it's funny that you asked that question, because I find myself, when I'm traveling it's either one or the other I'm the most forgiving, most easy to please most wonderful guest, because I know how hard it is, in which case I kind of turn off all of the you know what could go wrong here. Now, that's a little bit hard for me to do because I'm constantly aware if I'm interested in a hotel. What does the people's slow look like here? How have they set this out? I think for me, the anticipation of understanding who you are ahead of time and executing in a way that they do something special that has a really nice touch that isn't necessarily loud, it isn't necessarily big and important, it's just small. We have so many examples from our hotel teams. One of the ones that comes to mind for me is we had a hotel guest drop a bottle of perfume by accident, spent a bottle of perfume. You know you feel badly already. you're the guest. They called housekeeping because there was glass everywhere. We, of course, responded right away, but beyond just cleaning up the perfume bottle, when they went out to dinner, our housekeeper, who was empowered to do this, went to our gift shop, grabbed a bottle of perfume that we happened to sell as part of our spala. mine put it in the room and said so sorry that happened, but hoped the rest of your stay might be made better by trying this fragrance from our collection. Oh my goodness, like beyond, like no one expects you to do that. they're just happy that you put their bathroom in a way that didn't have glass everywhere, right, but it had to happen in the moment They were smart enough to do all. the guests was at dinner. The immediacy of it matters, right, if we sent them a bottle of perfume at home two weeks later, not the same. So timing matters, being attentive matters and actually just really being empathetic. If your team is really putting themselves in the shoes of your guests, that's when good stuff happens, because you're really thinking about what might matter to them.

Yeah, it's so true. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about luxury hospitality, because you have such an incredible collection. I'm thinking about a lot. I was at the NYU Investment Conference last week and they're just talking about the rise in global wealth and there's this tier of luxury travel that has new expectations, increased expectations The CEO of Accor was talking about for his ultra-luxury properties. Half of people are not asking about price. It's about availability, it's about what incredible experience can you offer. Then I was talking with the head of research at JLL and he did a massive study with his team on this. It seems like a really big opportunity, i think, for our listeners, whether they're in luxury or not. Many times, luxury travel is a bellwether for what other aspects of hospitality we'll see. So, i guess, for you and your business, what are you seeing, hearing from your guests? How are you thinking about the luxury traveler today and how to create something special and unique?

I think your summary is a really good one, josiah. I think guests are willing to pay a lot for an amazing experience, but guests are also really smart. So for us and in our teams, never lose sight of quality. Don't be so unrealistic that you're not having. If something is expensive, make sure the quality marches right along with it. So if you're raising prices, there better be quality that goes along without any expectations. I think there's increasing evidence on what's been called a lot delivering great experiences. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But I would say, having people feel like they're in the place that they are, and that sounds simple. But delivering a wrapper that describes the culture of the place where they are, and that can be food, wine stories, local experiences, getting people close to what's real as opposed to something that's manufactured. So let me give you an example from our wine experience, because in our champagne house do a lot of private wine tours as part of the experience. The approach that we've taken is really customized. We think about it as co-chirp charbous, as our collection. It's real Everything that's happening when you're in that space. If they're hosing off something, that's really what they're doing, if they're clipping in the vineyard and you want to go in and tell it's real. We try to not have it be. It's not a show. People don't want to show, they want to know the real thing. And that sometimes isn't as glitzy right, your feet might get muddy if you really go in the vineyard. It will give you the wellies, but it's muddy, that's the deal. We're not trying to have it be polished, we're trying to have it be authentic And we think about that in all of our wine tours, that you're trying to meet people where they are with their wine knowledge. You're trying to give them exposure to exactly the way it is and how the day comes. And I'd have one other piece of it. I think, particularly in the luxury and we think about this with all of our team There also needs to be a sense of humility, a sense of caring and kindness. It's not showing, that's not pretentious, that's real and human and humble and authentic. And That's easier said than done, but that's truly our ambition as we try to execute a luxury product.

What's exciting, because there's so much nuance and you've spoken to the different dimensions of what's required to deliver that. I'm just curious what are you thinking about these days? Anything that you're excited about?

Let me share one element that we're trying currently in our hotels Sounds simple but executing and is hard, and this is back to this notion of experience and generating experiences. One of the things that has come out of COVID is people. We are humble servants. We want to connect with others. We've taken a step back in. How do we think about that approach? with our teams, we're moving to what we actually call them gems. I love it that. It's a double-on-changre between a precious gem and also a guest experience manager, which is the condensed version. We have gems in our hotels. When you arrive, you will have already had correspondence from the gem that is going to be assigned to you. That person meets you at the front door and already has done everything they can to learn about what they can do for you. Our objective is, by the time that guest leaves, that you have literally built a connection with that person. What we have found is our team is so much happier because they have really understood how much they have enhanced the vacation or the business meeting, or whatever it is, of those guests Building that connection, thinking about how do we use technology or not? There's tools. Is it a WhatsApp connection, a text connection, or is it? here's where you always find the connection in this particular space in the lobby. First thing, though, that you should say as an operator is okay, well, what if it's that person's days off? Now, my guy isn't there, or my gal isn't there? Okay, it's thought about that. There's a backup gem. The handle has to be seamless, getting all this executed right, and we're still in the throws, but establishing a personal connection with someone on our team who's actually really good at this knows a lot. There's a lot of training that goes into that. Having you feel like man. Not only did I have a great time, i haven't been friend, i can still tell. That's part of it.

This is super interesting to me. I was talking to a CEO this morning who is like this is the future of hospitality, because bad service or bad hospitality experiences, there's so many handoffs. I talked to this person. I'm getting the key here, then I'm paying over here, and it's a steady stream of handoffs, one to the next. He's like no, no, the great hospitality is about minimizing those and you have somebody guiding you through the journey. It sounds like you've done this. You've actually. It's not just an idea, but you have a program and I get summarizing the opportunity. You see, that's good hospitality.

Bingo, like if there's seamless transition, is like a well-made suit. Every stitch is next to the one before it and it's all linked together and the thread is perfectly tied off. What you see when you put on that suit is tremendous comfort set idea.