Hospitality Design - March 2012 - 62

perspectives

interview: bill heinecke

a community, but rather, put something back into it. We’ve found many of our guests today get great pleasure from knowing that they’re involved in or contributing to something, or that they’re helping somebody.

HD: So in your opinion, is that today’s luxury?
WH: We’re seeing a whole different view on things. People are more sensitive to the communities and to the environment, to the places that they’re visiting, and they don’t want to leave wreckage behind. They realize that if they want their grandchildren to see what we’ve seen we have to be a little bit more careful, and hotels have to make less of an environmental impact on where they are otherwise the destinations aren’t going to survive— especially the smaller, more sensitive ones.

HD: You say that it’s very important to have a great team. How do you nd the people you collaborate with?
WH: I think for me it’s a question of also traveling the

Underwater dining at Anantara Kihavah Villas in the Maldives.

world. When I see something that grabs my attention I try to ﬁnd out who the people are behind it, how it came into being, and what there is to learn from it. That doesn’t mean that you try and replicate something. We’ve got a tented camp in Thailand, but it’s very different than any tented camps in Africa because it captures the Thai element. You still have to know what the competition is like because the people who are going to come to our tented camp are very likely going to experience the tented camp in Africa, and what is going to make our experience stand out? We’ve built the Burma Bar, which looks onto Burma and out over the elephant camp. How often do you get a chance to enjoy a sunset cocktail and watch the elephants beginning to unwind from their day of work, or watch them bathe in the river at sunset? These are moments that memories are made of. That’s what makes travel so special.

Tanzania, the Maldives. Unfortunately, to get to any of those places it’s very hard. That’s one of the reasons why we have our own planes, so that we can ﬂy between them more easily, because we tend to build in unusual locations. If you wanted to get to Mauritius from Bangkok it would take you probably thirty hours of ﬂying and airport layovers to get there. We can get there generally by dinnertime.

HD: So do you have a eet of planes?
WH: We have a charter jet service that the company uses when they have company needs, but I’m a pilot; I ﬂy helicopters and airplanes. I learned to ﬂy just to make travel easier for me. When we started in Thailand, just to get around I needed a plane and as we got bigger we tended to get bigger planes. But that’s been, to me, one of the great joys of life—to be able to explore these places and not have to go through the airline schedules to get there. That’s allowed us to ﬁnd a lot of places that would be such a chore if we had to do it any other way. So you tend to discover some places before the masses do.

HD: How do you keep up on what guests want?
WH: I follow Trip Advisor. When you’ve got so many hotels you really want to see what people are saying about them, and that’s one of the ways you can stay on top of it. We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that we’re not in the hotel business; we’re in the hospitality business. We’re in the business of giving people great experiences and making sure they get great value for money. People work hard for their money and their vacations—sometimes it’s their time that’s even more valuable than their money.

HD: Do you y yourself around?
WH: We have pilots, but I still ﬂy quite a bit myself. I think the important thing about work is to do the things that you enjoy and make work less work and more pleasure. Being a public company, of course, the planes are on my personal balance sheet.

HD: What are some of your greatest lessons learned?
WH: The importance of people. You’ve got to have great people, whether it’s the designers, the architects, or the consultants, to create incredible hospitality experiences. Everybody these days can build the hardware, but getting the software to run is a lot more difﬁcult. In my book, The Entrepreneur, I’ve written a chapter about it. It’s not brands that build people, it’s people who build brands. Even the most successful brand in the world can fail in a given country or area if it doesn’t have the right people.

HD: Seeing the prospective sites from the air must give you a privileged perspective.
WH: Certainly. We’ve used the helicopter a lot in surveying many of our locations. Somebody may go by the airline because they’re only going to go there once a year or once in a lifetime, but when you’re creating some of these unusual places you’ve got to go there every couple of weeks, because if you don’t spend the time on the hotel in the development phase, you’re not going to give the guest the experiences they want. We still want to be a part of each of our developments, to touch them, frame them, and shape them into an experience that we think our guests will ﬁnd unbelievable.

HD: Is there one place that you love to travel to that you can’t get enough of?
WH: The Indian Ocean, all the way up to Africa and Mozambique,

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