The man with a grand plan

Six Senses Resorts and Spas MD Bernhard Bohnenberger reveals the company's ambitious global expansion strategy and explains why barefoot luxury is far better than bling.

Six Senses has made several resort announcements lately. What's the plan?

We are essentially looking at establishing10 clusters as we feel we can best support our properties by having regional hubs.

Our main hub is still Bangkok, but our previous chief operating officer, Dan Reid, is now chief regional advisor for the Americas and Pacific and is working on projects there in countries spanning from Panama to Brazil. In addition, Alasdair Junor, who has been the GM of several properties in Asia, has moved to oversee Europe and the Middle East, another area we are planning to support.

 

Do you think Europe is a cost-effective market to enter?

What works for us is to establish our properties in places that are not seasonal -those with tropical climates all-year-round - and where staffing costs are not a big issue. If you set up projects in seasonal places with high payroll costs - somewhere like Northern Europe - it won't work. But you will see us in locations further south such as Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Croatia.
 

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What other new markets are you entering? Would Australia be an option?

We are looking actively in China and will open a property Fiji, but it's virtually impossible to run our kind of products with a limited number of people and that's what we would have to do in a place like Australia hence our concept works better in the belt around the centre of the globe. A lot of people have talked about us going into Australia and New Zealand. The only product we would look at here would be in a location around vineyards.

What about your spas?

In addition to our new Six Senses Destination Spas brand, we have our stand alone spas, which we not only have in our own resorts but in three Ritz-Carlton properties - in Doha, Barcelona and Portugal. We are about to announce spas in hotels in Paris, London and maybe Kuwait and we are looking at implants at luxury hotels across many cities.

There is also an opportunity to run spas on cruise ships. This means that even if we don't have a resort in a certain location, we can bring a little bit of Six Senses to some of our clients.