Guests are Complex. Hospitality Needs to Catch Up. (Philippa Wagner)

Josiah: One of the things I'm trying to do on this show is raise awareness for what could hospitality look like, and you've built an amazing career in this, and you have built an amazing business in this. You have an incredible set of research. We'll include links in the show notes where people can learn more. But by way of introduction, I want people to get to know you a little bit more. Tell us a little bit about the work you did early in your career, and then I'm fascinated to hear why did you decide to work in the world of hospitality? Let's rewind the tapes. Tell us about some of your early career roles and what got you started in the work you do.

Philippa: So, to rewind quite far back, I was in the trend forecasting industry. I was actually working in the fashion world doing cycles of spring, summer, autumn, winter, and it became a bit disingenuous. It's like, how many times can we reinvent a trend for the sake of a trend? So I segued my way into more strategic thinking for brands. I worked with the likes of Spotify, North Face, lots of different brands across lifestyle industries. No hospitality specifically. A bit of retail and a bit of F&B on the edges, but actually it was an out of the blue phone call. It was a headhunt from Ennismore. Sharan, CEO and founder at the time, and Martina Luvaas-Hertz, his right-hand woman, CMO, were looking for somebody who understood the future of culture and people and life, but didn't come from a hospitality background, so didn't come with the preconceptions of that.

In complete honesty, when I first got the phone call, I said, "What? Who's Ennismore?" And then they said, "The Hoxton Hotel." I said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, that makes sense." And it just was a match made in heaven. The result of that was that I developed what became known as 23 Lab, which was an insights innovation lab whose sole purpose was to look at the future of hospitality, who future guests would be, what potential future brands could fit within the wider Ennismore portfolio.

Bearing in mind, this is pre-COVID, pre-merger. So it was Hoxton and Gleneagles, and both of those brands had been bought by the Ennismore business and given life and made into the amazing brands that they are. But for me, the remit was what would our future guests want, and what brands and experiences and bolt-ons to these existing brands could we develop?

And it was an amazing opportunity. I think the best thing was that they just said, "For three months, don't do any work." Well, not completely don't do any work, but just go and explore and interrogate and lift up the rocks and poke and prod people and say, "Why are you doing it that way?" Because operations in the industry, as I learned very quickly, they like to do things in a certain way, and they'll just continue to do those things in a certain way. But that's not necessarily to say it's always the right way. So it was a great opportunity to really get under the skin of it and fall in love with the industry, quite honestly.

Josiah: Fantastic. Now, I really believe we can get better in hospitality by learning from other industries. I think the way that you entered the hotel and hospitality industry is really interesting. What do you think were the experiences or perspectives you were bringing from some of your prior roles that Ennismore wanted to work with you and work with somebody outside of the industry?

Philippa: I think ultimately it's the lens of people first, which is why my business is specifically called People Places Spaces. I remember having a conversation and being quite shocked at one point when I said, "So who is your future guest? Who is the future luxury guest if we're going to develop Gleneagles, do X, Y, and Z?" And they said, "Oh, well, you know this." And I said, "No, no, no, that is a segmentation. That is not a mindset. That's not a set of values."

Recognizing that was something I had built my whole career on, was looking through that lens of tracking behaviors and people and systematically spotting the dots amongst the noise and finding those to create what I talk about as big breadcrumb trails to the future, because you can't fix anything at any time. But understanding those values and those expectations, I think that's the thing that really was a USP. And it was uncomfortable sometimes for the business because they were like, "I don't really understand why you want to think like that, because we're doing okay, thanks." You are, but tomorrow you probably won't be if you don't think about it going forward.

So yeah, it's that people cultural lens. A brand like Ennismore had that in spades. They've driven the industry very much, but sometimes it's easy to forget that that's going on and you sort of sit on your laurels. So removing them from the industry, the rest of the industry doesn't necessarily behave like that. They'll just look at segmentation. Are you a business traveler or are you a leisure traveler, or are you a family? And it's like, no, no, that's not what it's about. And I think that underpins everything we're going to talk about today.

Josiah: There's a lot we're going to get into today, but I think it's such an important point because I've always looked up to Ennismore as being very innovative and thinking of what experience can look like. But to your point, it can't be a one-hit wonder. You have to always reinvent yourself. You have to always be learning, and we're going to get into a lot of elements in this conversation of how our listeners can do that for themselves. But before we do that, I want people to understand a little bit more about your business, People Places Spaces. You touched on this a moment ago. Why did you start the firm? Tell us a little bit about what you do and how you do it.

Philippa: So it's a COVID baby, and like many people in the industry, of course, the doors were shutting of the hotels, and we were all sent home. I was furloughed within the first month, I guess, because it all moved quite quickly. But being furloughed meant you couldn't do anything because the only things that were happening were the projects that needed to continue behind the scenes. The merger was going on in the background, and there wasn't really, I didn't think, a place for me at that stage. And often what happens, insights innovation is one of the first things to go when people are looking at numbers in new ways. Not saying that's correct, but that's the reality.

So I took a punt, and I pulled out and said, "I'm out, and I'm going to set myself up in my own business," which was a risk considering we were still in lockdown. I didn't really know what was going to happen, but I got the bug for the industry. As everything happened at that stage, everything went online, so I went to every conference and every event I could online, and I was in Zoom rooms chatting to people all over the place and getting a sense that the industry was in turmoil and not understanding what was going to happen next.

And also that there was this new category within the industry that was emerging that I had known nothing about, which was the aparthotel, the extended stay, because it was the only hotel category that was allowed to stay open during COVID. I started to get a sense that this world had many layers to it.

So yeah, I just wanted to help businesses and brands understand the shifts that were happening. And also, what was happening at that stage is everyone was using that word pivot. We're all going to pivot, and we're all doing this, and everything's being fast-tracked. And actually, everything that we're seeing now is happening anyway. All these shifts, these trends I've been working on, but we just hadn't got the chance to give them birth yet. It just sort of brought everything into clarity. So it's about, okay, how can I help businesses really take that and make it into a reality for future safety, but also from a commercial perspective, but more importantly, for an industry that needs to change to suit the way that the world works now.

Josiah: Well, that is a good segue into what we're going to be talking about, the way the world works now, how change might unfold. You, a little while back, published The Future Guest Report. I wonder if you could describe, how did this come about? What is it? And then we're going to get into some of the themes that you picked up in your research.

Philippa: Yeah. So Future Guest, which I published in about October last year, was the second Future Guest that I had published. Its infancy traces back actually to Ennismore. One of the things I did when I was at Ennismore before lockdown was we had created a digital platform of guests who stayed at lots of our properties across the globe and had them as a community of people who were our cultural barometer of what was happening and people who regularly traveled, and they would give us live feedback and live information about what they were doing in our hotels.

Obviously, that got shut down, but it unlocked this idea in my head about how valuable it is to get that insight and that data and really be able to track those behaviors in real time. So as we started to come out of COVID, I did the first Future Guest report. It never got published because it got bought indirectly by a client, TFE Hotels in Australia, and it was the backbone to MMNT, which is the world's first live hospitality lab, which is also a running mini hotel at the moment. It is being rolled out as the next brand within their portfolio, which is fantastic.

So that was the infancy of it, and seeing the reality of how a piece of insights and data from real travelers and real industry thinkers became a real product in three-dimensional physical, P&L, everything literally running. I wanted to do it again, but I didn't want to do it and just give it to a client. I wanted it to go out into the world because I think there's much more value and richness in that wider dialogue. And then it felt like the right time to do it. I actually just put a post on LinkedIn today saying, "No, there isn't one coming this year," because people keep asking me, "Is there another one coming?" I'm like, "No, because this isn't about constantly filling the world with more noise and more trends, and we should be chasing this."

We're a reasonably slow industry because we work with bricks and mortar. CapEx shifts tend to be five, 10 years. We don't want to be chasing it for the sake of it. So it's about putting real usable insights into the world that people can use individually on their own, or of course, great if they want to work with me and the team that I work with so that we can actually implement some of that stuff.

Josiah: I saw that post you had this morning. I'm going to include a link in the show notes, because I do think that this is a really important point because sometimes I feel when people are trying to come up with what are the new trends this year, they feel a bit trite. And I think you have a really good point. This is also a real estate business, and real estate and build-outs and investment just takes multi-year cycles at a minimum. And so it almost does a disservice if we're only looking at what's hot in 2026 or whatever the year is. So I want to get into some of these. This is a very large report. We'll include a link in the show notes. I have it in front of me, 98 pages. I want to start out with a quote of someone who's been a guest on this show many times before, Michael Levy, and the quote is, "Hospitality is addicted to either/or, but guests live in both/and. Until we accept that paradox, we'll keep serving yesterday's needs, not tomorrow's." And you really open up this report with the both/and guest. I would love to hear this in your words. What is this? What can we learn from what's happening here?

Philippa: Yeah, I think it was really interesting. The way I set this research up was it was organic. It went out through social media. It went through word of mouth. It went through people I know within the industry. There was no, if you answer this question, you're going to get a free stay here, or an Amazon voucher. It wasn't about that. I wanted people to actually respond to it because they actually wanted to give their opinion and because they would see the value in sharing it back.

Once I got all of that information and I collated it, I then came up with the thinking behind it, which is the baseline of the report. But I also didn't want to do it in my own isolated bubble. I wanted to get that bandwidth of industry people, hence Michael, the brilliant Michael, alongside other thinkers and shapers within the industry who all represent a different part of the wider spectrum of the industry, and I use them, as I called them, my sounding board.

So I went to them with the report and said, "Here you go. This is what we're thinking," and went backwards and forwards. So Michael was responding to the genesis really of what this report came back with, which was that people are messy. People are contradictory. People aren't segmented, and we shouldn't segment them. Now, it's not a big woohoo moment for most people, but for the industry it really is. And I think that was what was quite telling because the data was a real mix of mostly people who work in industry but also regular travelers because that's, by the nature of people they are, like me right now, I'm in Vienna in a client's hotel room, constantly traveling, but also people who travel a lot.

So it was really interesting to see the distance in thinking between industry people and when they've got their traveler hat on, and we can't be put into a box of "I'm a business or leisure," "I am solo or a group," because we're all of those things all the time. So the both/and guest was just really to highlight to the industry, stop it. Just stop it now because people are people and are multifaceted, and the industry needs to rethink that.

Within that, it's this constant flip-flopping of who we are and what we're expecting, particularly in really technological worlds, that constant debate that people are having. AI's going to ruin the world. AI's going to make the world a better place. It's like, what is going on? So how we respond to that reality of people just being not one thing or the other, but literally this both/and. It's like I want to be everything at the same time.

Josiah: So I'd love to get your perspective on this from two angles. One of the things I love about your work and your practice is, it's not just ideas. You alluded to this even earlier in your work with Ennismore. There's observations on the operations. I'm a marketer. I think maybe one of the big implications of this is how we think about communicating. I would love to hear your implications for marketers or the commercial leaders listening and then for the operators. What does this mean? But first, from a marketing or communications perspective, what do we do with this? What is the implication?

Philippa: I think the implication is you stop thinking almost as just marketers or operations. I think you need to think about it as a collective. It comes back down to the values that you are offering as a product or as a service, and then it's about the audience that you're talking to as you leverage that. And that's how I work with a lot of my clients. As a business, we work very closely with businesses. We're not a big agency. That was a clear decision that I wanted to make at the beginning, and we set ourselves up, and I say it on my website, we're more of a confidant than an agency for that reason because it's about getting to the core of the values that you stand for.

So whether you're the operator or the marketer talking about it, if you understand the values that you stand by, then you know which levers to pull and which messages to create. So when you've got a marketer who might be thinking, "Okay, pleasure, purpose," which is one of those both/and. Guests want pleasure, but they want purpose. We know they do. Well, the reality is you've got to stop making them feel guilty and stop greenwashing.

So operators tend to make the guests feel guilty because you walk into your bedroom, and there's that card on your bed that says, "If you leave your towels in the shower, you'll be saving X water." Rubbish. I mean, yes, that's not to say that's not true, but at the end of the day, it's a cost-saving exercise. Let's all be honest. We know that's the truth. Yes, of course, it's going to help, but when you look at the stats, it doesn't matter. Travel is a luxury, and it therefore has an impact.

You flip that same to the marketers, they pick it up and go, "Okay, we know people want pleasure and purpose," but you're going to greenwash the minute you start to talk about that. So it's about how you stop making the guests feel guilty about the choices they're making, and you stand by what matters to you and your values.

And therefore, if your values are, we're going to be lean and we're going to run a really simple operational system, we'll still put that card on the bed, but we won't talk about it in a green storytelling. We'll talk about it as like, "Well, we just saved you money. You're paying five euros or $5 less a night because we've done this," and be transparent about it.

And then the marketers can then talk about it their way, going, "Hey, this is what we're doing because this is what we believe in, giving you the best." So it's just about getting to the core and not pretending you're on different travel edges, I guess.

Josiah: There's a great quote you have in the report to the effect of travelers want champagne and a clear conscience. And I think even the way that I teed up the question of like, what's the marketing implication, what's the operations implication, I like how you're bringing it together. We need to think as one team, as hospitality providers from the very first touch points, the very first communication, all the way through every step of the guest journey to post-stay. And I think it's been really remarkable for me on this show talking to people, for example, that I think are very forward-thinking with sustainability, and they run these operations that are highly sustainable, but rethinking what that looks like because I'm thinking of a conversation with Hans Pfister, who runs Cayuga in Costa Rica and, you know, they've done a lot over decades in this area, and he said, "Hey, I'm finding for my guests, there's less appetite maybe than there was for just a sustainable stay. We need to think about how is the property regenerative in the place," and that becomes part of the story. It becomes part of the experience. And is that what you're finding as well, this integrated nature of values but also a great guest experience?

Philippa: 100%. And it's very easy to sit here in isolation and say, "This is the way things need to be." Most hospitality businesses, particularly now, we've got the big guys who keep sucking up the small guys, and they just get bigger and bigger. It's very difficult to change the system because they're like tanker ships going through. But when you get the smaller businesses or innovators who can start to make change, it absolutely has to be about that.

I think a really nice example, and I did reference it in the report, but it hadn't opened at that point, and I have since stayed there in their pre-opening, was the Newman Hotel in Fitzrovia in London. It's a really good representation of pleasure of purpose because it's a five-star luxury hotel. The quality of the fit out, the FF&E, everything is beautiful. It's been really well considered, really well designed, great interior design. But lots of companies have great interior design. The guest does not have to scrimp on the pleasure because they feel it. You literally walk in and the service is impeccable.

But where the value comes in, that sustainable value, is the wider context because they've partnered with Soraya Hospitality, so they've been hiring from day one as they were building up, people from underprivileged backgrounds and bringing them into the industry, training them up, giving them a platform and opportunity.

So the guilt's been taken away, because I can still have an incredible service, and I can still spend time in the beautiful spa, and I think that's because Kindfolks, who are behind it, have a really clear set of values and a really clear purpose, and it's come through. Now, it was their flagship. Of course, they were going to push to get everything right. So when the second, third, fourth, fifth, maybe we'd be having a different conversation. But if you know who you are and what you stand for, you can make the right decisions because sustainability is such an overused word, and it's thought about in so many ways in such a linear form that actually people forget that it's so much bigger. It's that concentric ring of the ripple effect that goes out that makes all the difference.

Josiah: So interesting. I would love to get into another element of your findings, and that is around the solo traveler. Tell our listeners a little bit about what you found here because I still feel this is not talked about a lot. It feels like a big segment. You cover this in your research. What did you find?

Philippa: It's the one question that most people ask me about. Out of all of them, they're like, "Oh, so tell me about the solo traveler, and what do I need to know about that?" The solo traveler's always been there, but they've always been considered the corporate traveler, the corporate traveler who's going to come in and wants to just be efficient, get the job done, and get out.

And the reality of the insights were, when I put the questions out, I was looking for certain answers. It wasn't just throwing things out into the ether. I knew what I was looking for, but what I didn't know was necessarily the answers I was going to get. Because I've been tracking this. We've been seeing this coming. We've got a complete shift that's happened in the way that people are traveling and working and living, and that's influencing this.

Hospitality, traditionally, when people talk about it, think about hotels, but actually it's not. It's the co-living. It's the aparthotels, the whole wider ecosystem of what travel allows people to do. And so you're starting to see this rise of people living differently, therefore traveling differently. People are not necessarily having relationships in the same way, getting married, having kids. People who have got kids and family just going, "Do you know what? I've got time away from you."

I actually had one anecdote where somebody said, "I'll actually have a holiday on my own either before or after my family holiday to recover or to prepare me for it." The different reasons why people travel for solo reasons isn't because they want to be alone, and that's the whole point of it. It was solo but social. And also the mindset I put behind it was solo-ish because you are choosing to be alone, but you still want to be around other people. So it's this participation phenomenon that's going on.

I talk about it a lot with my clients who work in the co-working area as well, or that crossover between hotel lobbies and what that means. The reason I think co-working has been so successful is not because I can get a desk. It's because I can sit next to somebody doing something similar to me, and I'm going to vibe off those vibrations. I don't need to talk to them. I don't need to engage with them. And it's the same thing when you're traveling solo. You don't necessarily want to be in conversation, but you want to feel the vibe, feel the community.

So it's this idea that somebody might also travel solo on a Monday or Tuesday, and they might be there for work, but on a Wednesday or Thursday or maybe at the weekend, they bring their family over, they spend time with their friends. Or on a Monday or Tuesday, you might be really tired, but on the Wednesday you're like, "I just want people." And so it's not categorizing them as being an individual on their own, and also importantly, not treating them like a second-class citizen.

That came through really loud and clear. That feeling, we've all had it. You walk into the restaurant, "Table for two?" "No, just a table for one." "Oh." And then you're shoved in the corner in the darkest area. There's a reason why a solo single traveler will go and sit at the bar because they can have a conversation with bar staff or other people around them.

So that in itself is a really important recognition for the industry. But also what underlies all of this is the industry's response to that. Well, I don't want to make rooms for individual people because it doesn't make any sense to me, because if I can charge a room for two people, I can overindex here and there. And it's not about saying redesign every footprint of every property. But it's about recognizing that you don't have to always default to double occupancy, which is an industry standard.

So you don't have to put all the towels in the bathroom as if four people were staying in the room. Just put two in, and let them know if they want more. It's a sustainable story as well. It's not just a solo story. Design F&B spaces so that they're convivial without having to feel like, oh, you're the one on their own looking awkward. It's just a reframing of something we've already recognized.

Josiah: I love it. It keeps going back to this integrated nature of what it will take to succeed in providing hospitality. It feels like all these threads seem to connect. But speaking of connection, I think one of the things that really stood out to me over the years with, going back to Ennismore, what you and your teams did there and worked since then, is I feel your properties, your projects were very much a sort of a, I don't want to say like a living room of a neighborhood, but they're a neighborhood hub, right? They're not just sort of like this box where it's like if you're a guest. They were compelling, and so if I'm not staying at a Hoxton, I want to go there. I want to eat at the restaurant. I want to be, because it's this very engaging place, and your research gets into this a little bit, and I am curious what you found around, I think one of the data points was 84% of people would use hotels or a hotel's amenities without staying there overnight. So it seems there's a big opportunity. Tell us a little bit more about what you found in the research on hotels being almost like civic infrastructure.

Philippa: Yeah, and then that stat surprised me. I knew it was reasonably high, particularly because I'm ex-Hoxton, Ennismore world, so that's how I grew up in my hospitality world there knowing that that was a real thing. But it was much higher than I expected because the industry often still has hotels which are very much gated systems and boxes.

What I think was super interesting is the reality is that hospitality actually has a purpose and a responsibility to be about community. If you go back to the core of the word, hospice, it means care, which is why it's in hospital, why it's in hospitality. As an industry, we've actually forgotten that we care because we've been too busy worried about ADRs and growth expansions, et cetera, et cetera, and making sure that we're sustainable here and whatever. Actually care for the people, yes, of course, the industry does that. It's beginning to think about the planet. But actually community has become a buzzword in hospitality.

Everyone wanted a community hotel because, hey, Ennismore proved it worked really well, and suddenly their P&L was probably often more on F&B than it was on rooms. And what does that mean? And the world has been trying to chase that. But you can't manufacture community. Community is about participation. It's about coming together in ways that you share something.

And I think what's really important as hotels grow, and I'm talking about urban hospitality, of course, when we're talking about resorts, it's very different. It has to be within a gated system. But it is a responsibility because the civic spaces that used to live in our communities have been dying out. The pubs, the community centers, often the churches are also disappearing. Those were reasons people came to gather, and hospitality has a responsibility and a role to play within that civic community.

And you can see it working in isolation in certain practices. Okay, if we stop thinking about ADRs and RevPAR and TRevPAR, and we started to think about neighborhood KPIs in a different way, I think that's where it starts to get really interesting. And this was sparked particularly when I was doing the MMNT Berlin Lab. One of the things that we were looking at was saying, "No F&B," because actually, if you're going to be in urban environments, taking over old existing buildings, there's a huge amount of community already around you. So bring the spend in for overnight, heads on beds, but push them out into the network, into the community, and get them to spend locally.

So there is no F&B, there's no breakfast offer, which you can imagine from an operational perspective was like, "What do you mean there's no breakfast offer?" But there is, because there's 15 cafes around the corner, and we can recommend them. In an ideal world, you cross-charge because there's a seamlessness that would happen. And actually, that is where real community starts to happen because people start to recognize each other and support each other.

That's where I think the whole of the industry has to go. It's not for everybody, and that's completely fine as well. But we're starting to see that happen in luxury as well a bit more. You've got Six Senses have come into London, and they're much more a part of the community than you'd ever expect of a brand like that. So the industry just needs to recognize what they can do and start to change their metrics.

Josiah: I feel like what you've shared in our conversation so far is applicable across the ecosystem, regardless of where listeners find themselves. If it's a brand, ownership group, or an operator, you can apply some of these principles. But I wonder if you could speak specifically to developers, to owners, to investors. Is there anything specific you found in your research or in your work? As you mentioned, the best ideas aren't always applicable across every context. But when you're working with a developer or an owner, what have you found in your research or work that you would like them to be thinking about?

Philippa: The biggest thing and the biggest conversation I have when I'm often in panels or talking to cross-disciplinary people within the industry is the biggest problem is the investment within the industry right now is it's a five-year cycle. It's the fashionable industry to invest in at the moment. It's where the money sits. People are going, "Okay, five years in, five years out." As soon as you start looking short term like that, it creates problems because the investor's going, "Well, I'm not going to pay extra for my CapEx. Why should I put my CapEx up when it's an OpEx issue? And why would I not want to increase my revenue here, et cetera, et cetera," when actually it's not better for the longer term.

So in some ways, it's a really hard conversation to be having. But when you do find those diamonds in the rough, when you do find those developers, owners, and brands who are willing and open, often where I'm finding it is where a brand has been really successful for a long time, and then they've come up for air and they've gone, "Oh, what happened? We missed that. Our competitors have gotten ahead of us." And then they have a real reason to start looking at it, and that's when the conversation starts to shift. "Okay, what can I do? What is our future guest? How do we need to start thinking in much more of a long term?"

Or you get that unicorn situation where you get a really visionary investor, developer, operator who's like, "Do you know what? I've got an amazing asset. I think it needs to be this, but I don't know. Help me work out what it is." And I think Crafted at Powder Mills is a really great example. Chris King is an amazing visionary. He and the other Chris, the two Chrises, Chris Pena's now with Ace, they did Birch. And I worked with those guys on the second Birch. Unfortunately, cut a long story short, that didn't come to fruition in the long term. But when Chris came to me and some of the other teams that he'd worked with before, he knew what he wanted to do, but he wanted to have that longer term vision. He had great capital backers behind him saying, "Yep, we appreciate. We need to really understand what guests are expecting to look for."

Actually, we were working on that before Future Guest came out, and that restorative care, which is a trend and a mindset shift that sits within the research, was very much in its infancy when we were developing that. So there's no right or wrong, there's no perfect start, finish, and end. It's just about open to dialogue and recognizing that nothing's static and nothing's perfect. Everything's always evolving. And back to that point, the both/and guest can't be put into boxes, so don't.

Josiah: Well, there's some versatility it seems because of this dynamic, and it also underscores the importance of being future facing, but on a longer horizon, given how capital moves, given how development works, you need to think about, for me, this is why hotel and hospitality investment is so interesting because there's all these levers you can pull, and you can think about how do you create this ecosystem that is dynamic and profitable. And there is, you think about driving profits and performance, there's the top line where you need to be attracting and delivering a value proposition that is compelling. But then there's all the things that you can do in the operation that I think can be aligned with what people want, but is also fiscally responsible and drives the financial outcomes that you need. And so it feels like this big puzzle that is very compelling and very interesting as compared to other types of real estate investment and development.

Philippa: Yeah. And I think you really hit the nail on the head there in terms of how I've positioned People Places Spaces as a business. My background prior to Ennismore was trend forecasting, future strategic, looking sometimes 10, 15, 20 years ahead, very much doing this cycle of we're going to do another trend report. This is the latest trends. The business that I was working in was all about creating new trends to sell new trends to keep the engine going. And that didn't feel right for me at the time. It's like, how can we just keep filling the void with more noise?

But also that agency and other agencies are out there. They do the future of hospitality reports once or twice a year. Great. Often I'm quoted in those. But you look at them and you go, "That was a really interesting read, but what do I do with that? I've got no idea." So because I'd had that amazing opportunity at Ennismore to really get under the hood of operations, and I've continued to work very closely with ops teams all the way through the work that I do, the whole point of People Places Spaces is to have one foot in both camps, so that whatever we put out into the world should be able to be operationally leveraged in some shape or form, small or big, to be defined by the brand, the operational requirements, the market, all of those things.

But cushioning that solo-ish traveler, I could have gone out there and gone, "Everybody in the world needs to make one single beds floating up to the moon," because other people are doing that. But let's be realistic, that's not the truth of the matter. So it's saying there is a time and place for solo single rooms. There's a time and a place for that flexibility, but look at it in the wider context. How do you take each of those levers of the big narrative and go, "What does that mean for the F&B ops? What does that mean for the comms and marketing? What does it mean for the revenue teams to work out how they're going to cost their rooms? What does that mean in terms of how many towels you put into the room?"

It's all of those layers that makes it possible, and then hopefully the icing on the cake is, and I'd love somebody to come along and ask me to help them develop this, what does that mean when it becomes this individual room and the collective? Because there's a few innovators out there doing it, like Numa and Poyinto and MMNT, but no one's really owning it yet, and it's there for the taking.

Josiah: It's so interesting to hear you say that, and I spent a couple years working in the real estate business, and for all the reasons you described, this is where it becomes really interesting, and that maybe is the investment thesis where you could have a very sharp developer investor say, "Hey, we're going to develop something that is going to cater to some of these trends you've identified, but also part of our thesis is that we are going to communicate and execute the service delivery in this environment." It feels like that integrated nature of having a clear point of view, executing not only in development, but post-development, is where you can win.

If we could wrap by getting into a two-part question that touches on, I think you are so good at connecting these different dots of what's happening within hospitality, but outside of the world of hospitality. So what's something that you've noticed in the world of hospitality that has inspired you or given you a lot of energy recently? And then what's something outside of the world of hospitality that you're getting inspiration from? Because I think there's so much we can learn from outside of the world of hospitality and bring into this industry. What comes to mind for you?

Philippa: That's a big question, because I'm constantly looking at everything all the time. I think in hospitality, the thing that's exciting me is this wellness conversation. Now, part of me is recoiling at my own sentence coming out my mouth there because I find it so frustrating that wellness is the big topic within the industry. But I'm not talking about bolting on spas here. I'm not talking about that traditional wellness, but the opportunity that the hotel hospitality wider industry can deliver us in terms of finding equilibrium, finding that balance within our nervous systems.

I have been spending a lot of time in that wider community of wellness, of what started in Toronto, came to New York, and is very much in London, the sauna community, where you are in a community of 50 people in a sauna, sweating it out, doing a little bit of yin yoga, then plunging in a minus seven degrees cold bath, and connecting with people in new ways, and walking out better than we feel before.

Now, that for me is a huge representation of how we need to find balance in our lives. It's all those things that just help us reconnect with ourselves, and I think we're starting to see around the fringes of hospitality, this beginning to become part of it. And it's the community conversation. Again, it's not just the wellness, it's that wider element. So for me, that's a really big piece.

I've been working on a hotel project in Glasgow. Amazing building. Amazing developer investor behind it. A very open visionary. Their first foray out of office into hospitality. And in the basement, there's the potential to create a spa. And I've gone to them and said, "No, don't do that. This is what you need to do," and build something in much more community wider lens. And his reaction was like, "I don't understand this because it's not what I would do, but I see the value in this."

It's this relationship and this ecosystem. I talk about it almost like a precinct model that the hospitality will start to build around it. And I think that's where the inspiration comes in. It's in the community connection without talking about community as a hospitality product. It's about community as being the truth that allows us, as a lot of people said, and we pulled it through into the report, "I want to walk away from the hotel feeling better than when I arrived because the mattress is the best, the lighting is the best, the air temperature is phenomenal," not because I went and had a spa and had a facial, but because everything else just worked beautifully.

Josiah: That's so great. So great. And what about something outside the industry? Anything outside of hospitality that has captured your imagination and you find yourself thinking about?

Philippa: I mean, the wellness element, but of course, it's within the category, I suppose. That's the thing.

Josiah: That's true. That's true.

Philippa: No, nothing that I can think of that's really inspiring me. I think partly because there's so much negativity and noise right now, and it's very difficult to not get distracted by that. And I'm always looking at everything all the time because that's my position as a business. So for instance, we're working on a private members club in Berlin at the moment. Now, you should never go to Berlin and open a private members club because private members in Berlin is a no-no. So we've been looking at that wider lens of everything. From work, automotive, living, health and wellbeing, we're looking at everything, and I don't think there's anything specific that will land, but there's the things in all of them that are inspiring, and they always are, because that's the way my brain works, I guess.

Josiah: Well, I'd love to have you back on the show sometime. I wish we had more time because I wanted to hear your thoughts about hospitality in America. But maybe we'll have to save that for part two. That's a whole nother podcast. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking time to speak today. I've learned a lot from you, and I appreciate you taking the time.

Philippa: Well, thank you very much for having me.