Boutique Design - Winter 2020 - 6

FRONT OF HOUSE

VIRTUAL
S AV E T H E D AT E
BDNY 2021
2 0 2 1 N OV E M B E R 1 4 - 1 5 AT T H E
JAV I T S C E N T E R I N N E W YO R K .
M O R E I N F O AT B D N Y. C O M

REALITY
During the 2020 BDNY Virtual Conference this past November, the
COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis it has wrought on hospitality
was naturally a front-and-center topic. And while it's easy to look
at things as being pretty dire for the industry, there was also a
clear sense of optimism and opportunity on full display during the
event's panels. Here's a quick look into what an industry mainstay,
up-and-coming brand, and design stalwart have to say about how
the current challenges are actually setting us up for innovation-
plus their evolving notions of what teamwork and leadership
meant during 2020.

T H E AC H OT E L TO K YO G I N Z A BY N I K K E N S PAC E D E S I G N

ALIYA KHAN

Vice President, Global Design
Strategies
Marriot t International
PANEL:
NEWH BEYOND/BrandED

6

WINTER 2020

How will Marriott brands transform following 2020? At Marriott
[we are choosing to] talk about transformation as a whole.
We focus on three different areas. The ﬁrst is stepping back
and looking at our 30 brands. Imagine having 30 children and
needing to make sure all your children have clear and distinct
personalities, that they're all good at something, and that they
all speak to something. We've used this time to take a beat and
look inward and say 'What are we doing here with our 30? Are we
telling good stories? Where are the synergies?'
The second is that we're trying to do a lot of stuff with
signiﬁcantly fewer resources. That has allowed us to look at
our team and collaborate in what I call the 'scrappy direct.' In
the course of that we've been able to ﬁnd all of this talent that
has existed, that maybe in our pre-pandemic lives we never
really knew about because we were always on the road or so
task oriented. We didn't stop to look around at this incredible
community. There are writers, there are storytellers, there's
a movie maker. The competition hasn't changed; the demands
haven't changed; the expectations around quality of product
remain. How we choose to approach all of that in a fresh way is
the second piece.
Lastly, what are we putting out there? We could say, 'I'm
only going to do business as I knew how to do it.' It's going to be
a prescriptive world of drawings and speciﬁcations, the same
FF&E, and solving the same problems that we've solved for years.
Or we could take a minute and say, 'What do we really need out
of this and how are we going to do it?' [In the beginning of the
pandemic] I was incredibly frustrated that everything looked
like it was from a crime scene. It had hazard tape, it was red, it
was alarmist. Why does it have to be this way? For our group, I'm
continuing to push the idea that we have to continue to dream.
We cannot allow this to put us into a paralysis where hospitality
design becomes hospital design.

P H OTO : N AC A S A & PA R T N E R S I N C .

By Katie Kervin
https://bdny.com/
Boutique Design - Winter 2020

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