#Trending This Week - Adventure Elopements, Hotel Rooms Made From Old Buses, Customer Service Ranks Poorly In Travel, And Outdoor Adventure Amenities
Issue 169 • December 5, 2023
We know everyone is busy as we race toward the end of the year, so we’ll keep this brief and to the point. What’s #Trending in travel and hospitality this week? We’ll start off with a sustainable approach to hotels. Rather than building a brand-new hotel from the ground up, this hotel group purchased old transit buses in Singapore and turned them into luxury hotel rooms. And if you’re involved in the wedding business, there’s a new wrinkle in destination weddings — it’s called adventure elopements. There is less of a focus on a big wedding by the beach and more on the couple exchanging vows by a volcano, iceberg, etc. with a photographer to capture it all. We’ve all seen the comments and complaints about how bad things have been in travel since COVID with airplane delays and a lack of labor to provide adequate service. So it should be of no surprise that a recent survey about customer service in a variety of industries showed that travel and hospitality companies are ranking rather low on the customer service scale. And finally, the latest amenity for hotels and resorts has nothing to do with anything inside the hotel, but more about what you can take guests to experience outside at the destination. Check it all out in our two-minute read below.
Adventure Elopements Are Becoming A Thing
Move over destination weddings, now we have adventure elopements! While they have been happening since 2014, the trend really took off during COVID. And now more and more young, active couples who are not in the mood to deal with the hassles and stresses of planning a big wedding are instead opting to personalize their weddings by hiking, paddling, or flying by seaplane to their ideal spot before declaring their love for one another in a natural setting—with a friendly photographer in tow. Read more in Thrillist here. 📷 by Styrmir and Heiðdís, courtesy of Pink Iceland.
Repurposing Buses For Hotel Rooms
Hoteliers are getting ever more resourceful when it comes to building hotels. We’ve seen hotels made from containers, tiny houses, and now old buses. The Bus Collective is Southeast Asia’s first resort hotel to repurpose decommissioned public buses into luxury hotel rooms. The project renovated 20 buses that were once owned by Singapore’s public transport operator, giving them a renewed purpose within the hospitality sector — and a great story about sustainability. Read more on CNBC here.
Customer Service Is Lacking In Travel
How is the travel industry doing on customer service as it relates to other industries? A recent survey queried consumers about five components of customer service across a wide variety of industries. For an industry which takes pride in hospitality being at the core of its products, the results for travel companies were not impressive. The best placement was No. 25, Hawaiian Airlines. Hotel companies' hospitality apparently doesn't impress guests very much. The top-rated brand, Drury, came in at No. 56. Omni was next at 85, and the large hotel corporations didn't show up until No. 147 (Marriott's Westin). Read more in Travel Weekly here.
Outdoor Adventures Are The Latest ‘Must Have’ Amenity
Hotels are being called upon once again to step up their game. Now it’s not only about amenities offered on property. Hotels are embracing the great outdoors with bespoke foraging programs, on-staff naturalists, and hiking concierges. These days, it’s not only important for a hotel or resort to offer a great setting. Forward-thinking hoteliers are connecting guests with the destinations they travel to beyond admiring the view outside their suite’s window by offering them guides to make the experience of what they see — or need to be directed to experience — all that much more meaningful. Read more in Thrillist here.
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