Glenn Haussman spends a lot of time in hotels. A LOT.
When he's not staying in them, he's usually talking to the people who own, operate, design, and develop them on his podcast, No Vacancy Live!, which he's been running for a decade.
So ahead of HotelSpaces, we turned the tables and asked Glenn what he notices.
Glenn doesn't walk into a hotel room looking for a particular finish or amenity. He notices whether everything fits.
On a pre-opening tour of Fontainebleau Las Vegas, he walked into a guestroom and immediately felt that something was different. The proportions worked. The details worked. The room just felt right.
"You just felt it. You knew that this place was a little bit different."
Part of that, he thinks, is square footage. The rooms were laid out before construction stopped, giving the team a larger footprint to work with when the project came back to life.
Not everything is that abstract. We asked what he'd change in every hotel room in America, and he didn't reach for anything big.
"I am going to fix the length of the faucet. I know that sounds silly, but rarely does it come out enough that I'm not pounding my hands up against the porcelain."
The small things register too. An outlet next to the bed. A desk chair at the right height.
We gave Glenn a hot take: Renovating an existing hotel takes more creativity than building one from scratch. He agreed.
Existing footprints, small bathrooms and awkward spaces create constraints that have to be solved. Starting from scratch creates a different challenge: almost anything is possible, with budget ultimately narrowing the choices.
"You sometimes need some rules and constrictions in order to really bring out the best."
Then he added, "But I'm not a designer. You all do a great job on both sides of them."
We gave him another one: The hotel room is becoming the least interesting part of the hotel. He disagreed. He called a great room experience fundamental to what guests take away from a hotel stay.
But he's also interested in what happens once guests leave it. So we asked what hotels should be learning from outside the industry.
Theme parks think deliberately about how physical environments keep people experiencing a destination. Casinos, Glenn argues, understand what motivates individual guests particularly well.
"I'm still waiting for one of you out there to know what I like. You don't. Hopefully, you will. But every casino company, even though I don't gamble that much, knows exactly what motivates me and how to get me to spend money."
That's where we'll pick things up at HotelSpaces. Glenn will sit down with Scott Mallwitz of Walt Disney Imagineering and Kelly DeVine and Emily Marshall of HBG Design to find out what holds up when you bring that thinking into a hotel.
HotelSpaces | October 25–27 | Omni Fort Lauderdale