Hospitality Design - April 2023 - 42

perspectives interview
What is Selina's ethos?
The brand mission is creating authentic and meaningful connections with
people, places, and communities around the world. It's how we approach
design, how we create spaces. It's fundamentally to get people to connect.
We try to disrupt what is there and come up with something new. What we
do as a category is lifestyle, but it is lifestyle, hospitality, and travel.
A mix of cabins, campsites, and shared accommodations await at
Selina Magnetic Island off the shore of Queensland, Australia
How do you decide where to grow?
We have the market research team that looks at how people are traveling
and the trends and movements that are happening to be one step ahead.
Once we do choose to go somewhere, we try and expand within that market
to have a very clear pipeline of which destinations we want within the
country and how that's going to connect to our other locations. Ideally, we're
creating a network of locations where people can travel seamlessly through
them and experience new things, but also have the comfort and facilities
[they expect] while they're traveling, working, or just vacationing.
What are some of those consistent features?
Every location has a [coworking space]. Every location has a wellness space.
We have what we call democratic accommodation. It's a $10 hammock and
an $800 suite, and everything in between. You know that you will meet
people. We survey our guests whether they made a friend while staying
at Selina, and more than 60 percent consistently make friends, which
connects us back to our mission. We made a choice not to have TVs in our
standard rooms. Instead, we have a cinema in every location. If you have
TVs, people are going to stay in a room, but if you make them go out there's
a lot more chance they will meet people and connect. Everything that's
design-led is meant to help with the mission.
Situated in the buzzing Mitte neighborhood, the
suite at Selina's Berlin outpost is swathed in color
How do you handle the design of your properties?
Generally we only take over existing hotels. It dramatically reduces our
carbon footprint. We send a group of creatives to the location, we evaluate
everything that's there, and then we recycle whatever we can back into
the project. That makes every location unique. The workshop consists of
someone from our global team, but we always work with local artists and
designers. Our core design team, branding, and graphic design is in-house.
Slated to launch this month, the seaside Selina Dakhla in the South
of Morocco marks the brand's second property in the country
The bungalow-style cabins at Selina Dakhla
feature decks leading out to the sand
Have there been any surprising guest insights?
From a food and beverage perspective, we're going very plant-based and
doing partnerships with companies that are innovative in that space. We
[also] work closely with the music industry [creating] experiences around
music, whether it's festivals or music conferences. We have live shows
on a daily basis in locations. [When COVID hit] we learned right in the
beginning that there is this [digital nomad] movement. The connection
between workspaces and hospitality is something we want to lead. We're
now even more confi dent than we were before.
How does wellness manifest at your properties?
Every location has daily wellness programming. We have yoga, meditation,
pilates. Wellness is beyond just the physical and we have some wellness
partnerships coming up in terms of retreats. It's all-encompassing.
What are you looking forward to?
We recently expanded into North Africa with Morocco and plan to open
quite a lot of properties there-from surf locations to our fi rst desert location
and in great kite surfi ng spots, and Marrakesh obviously, as well as other
key areas. We're also opening our fi rst Spanish properties. It's a market
we've been planning on since the beginning. There are exciting things
we're developing and scaling in the experience space, and more interesting
partnerships in the pipeline. hd
Hospitality Design - April 2023

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