A luxury experience should stand well apart from day to day life. In this TV show Misha Pinkhasov shares his definition of luxury.

The luxury experience

Luxury is hard to define obviously because it's very personal. It's very experiential, it's very individual. For our purposes, we define luxury according to two things. And we don’t' try to go beyond that. One is that it's the best in category, it is where production meets art, and it really achieves a fantastic level, you know, an inspiring level of production. The other thing is that luxury has to be antidotal. It has to, the sense of luxury, the recognition of luxury is in the contrast with our daily lives. So if you have someone who sleeps in Fred A sheets every night, you're not going to impress them with sheets. If you have somebody who stays in five star hotels all the time, you're not going to express them, impress them, you're going to be hard-pressed to impress them with a five star hotel experience. We met with one hotel company who said, we recognise that our people, our customers live in homes that are way more luxurious than our hotels could ever be. So we have to be really creative about how we create the luxury hotel experience. One thing that I think a lot of luxury today gets wrong is that they confuse antidote with anaesthetic, and there's a certain overwhelming, numbing kind of opulence, which doesn't, which doesn't have that exciting, life-giving sort of life-breathing, energy-giving quality that luxury really should have.

The Hospitality Channel will continue to follow discussions around luxury experience and 5* hotels.

In the hotel industry giving the guest a positive experience should be the number one priority, as Richard Valtr discusses in this TV show.

Experience is key in the hotel industry

You’re mainly working with people. You’re not working with your rooms, you’re working with the guest satisfaction, with trying to drive the most amount of revenue while trying to actually bring up that kind of satisfaction with the service that's been offered. And I think social networks understand this very very well. Hoteliers are still stuck in a slight frame of mind that really makes them think that ok, I'm trying to sell a product, I'm trying to sell a room, I'm trying to sell any service that's connected to that. No, what you’re actually trying to sell is the experience. The experience of a city, the experience of your own individual property and also you're trying to, you're trying to explain why your there, why you're there to help and why you're actually trying to kind of enhance that entire experience. So, thinking about it more from the experience of coming to a hotel, rather than the fact of it.

The Hospitality Channel will continue to follow discussions around growth and revenue drivers in the hotel industry. Why not take a look at the latest hospitality briefings.

Innovative business models are being thought up everyday. In this TV show TripAdvisor's Minesh Shah explains how focusing on consumers has made TripAdvisor a success.

Customer focused innovative business models

It’s really just being focused around sort of consumers and what they really understand but also how that can help complement businesses as well. So it’s having the wealth of information that's being provided by the consumers and also the network of consumers that we have, this kind of social community that really enjoys to share experiences that are helping future guests potentially identify where they want to go. As we’ve kind of moved elsewhere in mobile, you know, with things like Ride With Uber and sort of find a location offline, so being able to have an offline app that you can download as well as kind of looking at the directions that are shown through the actual mobile. We’ve moved away I think, from sort of just being part of those preliminary conversations and the post-experience to also being part of the in-stay kind of experience as well. And I think it’s the value of just the social contents that we have and how we service it up and make it easier for consumers to find, that's really valuable.

Keep watching the Hospitality Channel for more expert insight in to innovative business models.