Come and get your congee
Backed up by the figures, Starwood has now ramped up its focus on overseas travellers.
“As Chinese travellers begin to travel beyond their borders en masse, they — just like their Western counterparts before them — will gravitate towards the hotel brands that they recognise from home, and with Starwood’s leading footprint in China, this gives us a great advantage,” said van Paasschen.
“Just as our hotels in China have historically catered to American and European travellers with familiar amenities from home, now our hotels globally will provide the same services to Chinese travellers.”
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Van Paasschen was referring to Starwood Personalised Travel — a set of initiatives which are designed to serve the unique preferences of Chinese travellers.
Under this new programme, being trialled at 19 Starwood hotels in gateway cities, guest rooms will feature in-room tea kettles, slippers, instant noodles, toiletries and translated welcome materials, restaurant menus will be made available in Chinese and feature familiar items such as congee, noodles and rice, and hotels will recruit an in-hotel Chinese specialist.
The programme is expected to be rolled out across all Starwood hotels and resorts by the end of 2012.
Co-incidentally, on the same day last month that Starwood announced Starwood Personalised Travel, Hilton Hotels and Resorts, unveiled its own global programme for Chinese travellers, Hilton Huanying.
A tailored experience, Hilton Huanying. takes its name from the Chinese word for ‘welcome’.
Thirty hotels are already enrolled in the programme, which debuts on August 16 in San Francisco, and features three signature hospitality touch points for Chinese guests — at arrival, in-room and breakfast.
For example, each hotel will have a front desk team member fluent in Chinese, rooms will offer tea kettles, a selection of Chinese tea upon request and dedicated television channel broadcasting Chinese programming, and breakfast will provide two varieties of congee with condiments as well as chopsticks, Chinese spoons and a soy sauce dish.
“Every experience we share with our guests begins with a welcome. Hilton Huanying is an extension of our brand promise to ensure every guest feels cared for, valued and respected,” said Dave Horton, global head, Hilton Hotels & Resorts.
“As the world prepares to welcome the growing number of Chinese travellers, we continue to lead and give our guests compelling reasons to choose Hilton.”
InterContinental Hotels Group — which actually beat Starwood to launching in China back in 1984 (Starwood opened The Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in 1985) — is another of the big boys making strides in China.
“I think we’re teaching everybody about that,” asserted Kirk Kinsell, formerly president EMEA and now president, the Americas for IHG.
“As a company, we’ve been in China longer than other global brands and we’re the largest global hotel company in China. The Holiday Inn name is seen as a Chinese hotel, they don’t know that it was started in Memphis necessarily. Part of our emphasis in building in China is recognising there’s going to be an outbound customer looking for our brands,” said Kinsell.
“The second emphasis is making sure our hotels across the world are ready to receive those customers and being savvy about the Chinese customer in terms of what they are going to be looking for from their stay.
“The Chinese are very curious people,” observed Kinsell. “They want to experience more, they like to travel, so it’s how you accommodate them and their needs, which we’re doing with our hotels. Certainly, we will continue to invest behind our technology and our central reservations systems and our online systems etc —all of those are important.”
Kinsell said hotels didn’t need to have a Chinese name to operate, but warned that the Chinese will translate your name.
“Holiday Inn Express wouldn’t be translated literally but it would be very close to that,” said Kinsell.
“In our last earnings call we spoke to analysts about work underway in China to create a China brand for the Chinese, which is a project underway today. That doesn’t mean that it would only be in China, but ultimately as the Chinese travel they’ll be looking for something that is differentiated for them as well,” he said.
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