| Andaz: Go Local |
| Cover Story | |||
| Written by Jill Rose | |||
| Monday, 01 June 2009 | |||
 By breaking down barriers between employees and guests, the team at Andaz is taking hotel stays one step closer to a visit with good friends.
 Jonathan Frolich, director of operations   Hyatt’s new Andaz brand is up and running with two hotels (London and West Hollywood) and two more planned in the next year (Wall Street and Fifth Avenue). The brand is pushing all the buttons for today’s sophisticated travelers—a home-like atmosphere, service that feels more genuine, and a connection to each hotel’s neighborhood in the form of art, food, and even employee uniforms. At Andaz, none of these ideas are simply given lip service. Rather, Jonathan Frolich and his team of 20 have rethought just about every aspect of hotels. They had some help in the form of a worldwide survey of 4,500 customers over six months. “We had a loose idea of a new brand, and we wanted to validate that concept and ask what people were looking for in a hotel,” said Frolich, who has been with Hyatt for 15 years and is director of operations for the Andaz hotels. The response, said Frolich, was overwhelmingly in favor of a hotel experience that delivers sophistication and quality without pretension, hype, or tradition. “They want something more deconstructed, more casual, more relaxed. More of a home-like experience. Something that is more in tune with the neighborhood.” Reaching out The biggest divergence from traditional is a complete redesign of Andaz hotels’ first floor. Instead of a lobby, a front desk, a concierge station, and a bellhop stand, visitors are greeted in a large lounge designed for multiple purposes. The staff is multi-purpose, too—Andaz hosts are check-in clerks, bellhops, and concierges rolled into one. Lacking a front desk to stand behind, the hosts hang out in the lounge interacting with hotel guests and those arriving for business meetings or to spend time in the bar or restaurant. When guests arrive to check in, a host immediately steps out to greet them and help with luggage. Thanks to mobile computing and a simplified check-in process, guests can choose to follow the host directly to their room to check in or sit in the lounge with a complimentary wine/coffee and learn more about the hotel during check in. (They also have the option of using a check-in kiosk or advance check in on the Web.) “We’re looking to break down barriers and increase interactivity,” said Frolich. “To do that, we’ve turned the arrival experience on its head. Rather than standing behind a desk waiting for a guest to come to them, hosts are able to engage with customers and reach out to arriving guests.” Interactivity, along with a local and a personalized angle, is also part of the dining experience at Andaz. At West Hollywood’s RH restaurant, for example, meals are cooked in an open kitchen using mainly locally purchased food. “We develop close relationships with local purveyors, local farmers, and local markets. It showcases the best of local, which is what we’re all about,” said Frolich. And just as guests can choose how they want to check in, they have more control over what they eat than in a typical restaurant. Frolich explained that diners can choose from the chef’s recommendations as in a regular restaurant or design their own meal by choosing a protein, cooking method, vegetable, and sauce. “It puts the customer in the driver’s seat,” noted Frolich. A suit in LA? Artwork and fashion are the two other ways Andaz is tying each hotel to the local community. Eschewing the formal, custom designed uniforms, Andaz employees get to go shopping with a personal stylist at a local designer’s shop. In West Hollywood, male employees are outfitted in Vince menswear, and women don fashions from Culver City-based Velvet. “Not many people wear suits in LA—if you do, you stick out like a sore thumb,” said Frolich. “So in our hotel, we didn’t want people to wear suits, but we wanted them to have a sophisticated edge. We purchase fashions off the rack and they change seasonally, like our menus. They’re very much an LA aesthetic.” Similarly, Frolich’s team reaches out to local artists to partner with them on public-space décor and cultural events. Frolich said the idea is to have the hotel be more than just a place to sleep or eat. “We partner with local artists, musicians, readers in residence in London, and writers to hold cultural events inside and outside the hotel.” The specific events and artist involvement depend heavily on the area. Rather than targeting a particular demographic, the Andaz team is looking to cater to the community. For example, while the West Hollywood property is geared toward the entertainment and music industry, the Wall Street location will focus on business and finance. To that end, Frolich and his team try to think like hosts rather than hoteliers when it comes to property-specific amenities. For example, knowing that most people staying at the Fifth Avenue property will be doing considerable walking as they explore the city, each room at the hotel, opening next spring, will have a footbath and custom-made bath salts. Learning to improvise Clearly, it’s not just Frolich’s team that needs to think differently about the brand and its customers. Employees, particularly the hosts, must follow a different path than their counterparts in traditional hotels. Frolich said fitting people to the new role starts with recruiting, where people are hired more for their personalities than their administrative skills. “We want people who are local and can make good decisions,” he said. “We want to empower people to make decisions and be the guests’ host. Think about what a true host is—we want them to be able to fill that role.” Once hired, hosts receive two types of training: traditional (skills) and non-traditional (improvisational). In West Hollywood, they participated in a two-day workshop with an improv comedy troupe. “The idea is to get them up on stage and have them perform in ways that will give them the extra confidence and improvisational skills to be able to deal with our very open concept,” said Frolich. He noted that the feedback from employees was phenomenal. “It gave them the confidence to be able to deal with guests in a very unscripted way.” The feedback thus far from guests at the London and West Hollywood locations has been just as enthusiastic. In fact, Frolich said it’s almost weird the way guests talk about the property using the words he and his team used when describing the type of service they wanted to provide. Indeed, TripAdvisor contains many customer reviews with comments like “loved the atmosphere” and found the hotel to be a “total LA experience.” A far cry from the days when hotels reflected nothing of their surroundings, causing more than one businessperson to wake up and wonder what city they were in. As Frolich puts it, “We are the antithesis of a cookie-cutter hotel.” |
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