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HOSPITALITY STAR
A hotel veteran continues to define-and raise the bar on-luxury today
As the story goes, Horst Schulze retired as vice chairman of Ritz-Carlton on a Friday, and started Capella Hotel Group (formerly West Paces Hotel Group) the next Monday. "Some people retire and play golf. I play hotel," says Schulze. "I wanted to retire. It was time to retire. I went home and talked to my neighbor who had retired asking him why he did it, and he said, 'So I can do what I like.' I asked myself: 'What do I like?' As soon as you stop doing a certain thing, you suddenly know exactly what you did wrong. I started dreaming about this wonderful li^le hotel where people really care for the guest, the employees, and the society around them. And I thought: 'If I don't get up and do this, I will regret it for the rest of my life.'"
Enter Capella. In just a li^le more than a decade, Schulze has opened 15 luxury hotels (some under ultra-luxury brand Capella, 5-Star home-away-from-home o^ering Solis, and others as 4- or 5-Star independents) grounded in personalized service and distinctive interiors in such varied locations as Mexico, Germany, Singapore, Russia, China, and Washington, DC. And he's just ge^ing started. Others are planned in the Riviera Maya; St. Lucia; Niseko, Japan; Doha, Qatar; Guangzhou, China; and Bangkok.
Here, the hotelier talks lessons learned, taking his time, and why, in his eyes, GMs shouldn't be designers.
Design-wise, what do you try to create with your hotels?
When coming up with any design element we always ask ourselves, 'What is the expectation of the customer today?' To cater to these expectations, I always tell my sta^ and designers alike to think local and act global. Our global guest didn't decide necessarily to go to St. Lucia or to Cabo, they decided to go somewhere based on a travel agent recommendation. Your resort is competing with a resort in Bali, or in Bora Bora, or on the Riviera, so you have to have the sophistication...