El palace Barcelona

In the anthropology class, we started to analyze the behavior of the Leisure class, the jet-set how we say nowadays. Few weeks ago, we went to visit the old Ritz of Barcelona, this hotel opened first in 20th century by Cesar Ritz.

A Swiss businessman man and owner of luxury hotel, he was also considered as the founding father of the modern hotel trade.

The main concept of the Ritz Hotels in the world is the services that the employee gives to the clients: Luxury, Sophisticated and Personalized services; this is one of the basic elements of the Leisure class, those clients wants to feel unique, they need to show off to proof that they don’t need to work.

To help you understand, what is the state of mind of the Leisure class, i firstly need to give you some details about how they change the luxury industry especially in hospitality. Few decades ago, people were separated in two groupes: Prowess activities such as religious or politicians and those who had a non-prestigious work such as manual workers.

As you can guess to be part of the leisure class the main criteria was to proof that you din’t need to work to enjoy and appreciate your journey as a Bon Vivant will do.

From an luxury hotel point of view, it’s means that you to need to provide to this class a feeling of uniqueness and you have to help this class to constantly show here waste of time. Those people want to get prestige out oh others work. when you think about it, that’s why you always have gastronomic restaurant, luxury spa, and that’s why you are willing to pay from 400 up to 2000 your room night.

During our visit at El Palace (the hotel change the name after being close and reopen few years ago), we met the director marketing of the hotel, he was telling us about the beautiful story telling that they create and how they were promoting the hotel as a THE PALACE of Barcelona. They means clients for now are people from the Emirat. Of course they are the perfect exemple of the leisure class, they didn’t choose the W with the beach and the beautiful view, no they chose the one at fews minutes from all the luxury brands and the one were Nina Simons, Josephine Baker, Woody Allen, Michael Douglas, Frank Sinatra or Whitney Houston went.

This is an over way to show this snob effect, they don’t want to stay where everyone can stay, no they wants be stay where celebrities go, to show how they succeed and how rich they are.If the services and the experiences of the hotel are well known it’s because they understood that the « always more » if highly appreciated one the modern luxurious society. Moreover with internet and the capacity to book an hotel on line you have to find a way to differentiate your business and it come with how you communicate; I will say that this is the main problem of this hotel. They don’t know how to stay luxurious and and modern.

We met Noella Lopez from a travel agency that we visit called « Ferret & Saret » , it’s a luxury agency that provide experiences, superior quality services. Their goal is to create trips, to give a new experience to a classic tourist tour for example. This is something that the leisure class likes, again we find this dimension on differentiation.

Nowadays, the luxury industry need to work harder than before, because the upper class wants more that just stay in a luxury hotel, they are looking for this unique emotion. And they are starting to be capricious because they know that they are not the only want looking for this emotions and this feeling of excellence.