Editors’ Note

Educated at Switzerland’s Hotel Culinary School and the Swiss Hotel Management School in Lausanne, Reto Wittwer began his career at The Palace Hotel in Madrid. Soon thereafter, Wittwer worked and lived in Paris, Tehran, Singapore, Hong Kong, Montreal, Acapulco, Indonesia, and Korea for InterContinental, Mandarin, Peninsula, Le Méridien, and Hyatt. Wittwer has been the CEO of three hotel companies: Swissôtel, CIGA, and Kempinski. He assumed his present posts in 1995.

COMPANY BRIEF

Munich-headquartered Kempinski AG (www.kempinski.com) is the operating company for Geneva-based Kempinski, a collection of 60 deluxe properties in major cities and vacation spots throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and South America. The group was founded in Berlin in 1897.

Given the strength of the luxury hotel industry over the past year, what are your projections for 2008?

We expect 2008 is going to be a record year everywhere we operate. Africa is good, Europe is good, and the Middle East and China are booming. Wherever we are, we’re going to have good results. We have 60 hotels in operation, and next year we’re opening 18 properties.

Are you opening properties in markets where you had seen a specific need and fit for Kempinski?

Obviously our growth is geographically predefined. We know where we don’t want to be. We’ll have openings in Eastern Europe, Africa, China, and other parts of Asia.

Is it important that your clients feel a certain consistency when they enter Kempinski properties, or do you try to tailor each property to the individual market?

We have a customized, individualized product line, which means that we really try to introduce the local culture and traditions into each of our hotels. The level of quality is as high in one destination as in any other. We also make sure that we offer enough training and education to bring the staff up to equal levels wherever we operate.

On the restaurant side of the business, you’re in many markets that have very good stand-alone restaurants. How focused are you on that product? Is it challenging to create successful hotel restaurants?

It depends. We have some markets where the best food in town is in the hotel, like in Djibouti. But then we have mature markets, like in Munich, where there are hundreds of restaurants around the hotel. There we have to ask, what do we want to be? We have to make sure we cater to our guests’ needs, but we don’t necessarily need to have five or six restaurants that are competing with the local scene.

Do you feel you have to offer your guests a full spa experience?

I think we’ve identified something that is a little bit more than a spa experience. I think it’s a lifestyle experience. It is different in a city hotel than in a resort hotel, because in a city hotel, people have less time. They want to make the most of the small amount of leisure time available to them. It’s a little bit different in resort hotels, because there people have plenty of time and want to look after themselves. In the past two years we have been working on putting together a holistic lifestyle concept, which we’re going to roll out next year. The first one is going to be in Jordan on the Dead Sea, where we have an Anantara spa covering 10,000 square meters. It’s enormous. We want to be sure that people feel good, mentally and physically. The European answer to spas is machine, equipment, and technology driven. The European answer is also to offer the best cosmetics in the Western world. We obviously have the Asian touch, with massage and exotic music, and we also have soft medicine. All of this is packaged together in our hotels now, especially in the new ones.

You seem to be focused on the size and scale of the company. Is there a point where you will not want to expand further? Do you have concerns about your ultimate size?

To my knowledge, we are the only hotel company of this size that does have a cap. We are in the luxury business. We cannot endlessly multiply luxury, because then it becomes a mass commodity. If you have the same experience wherever you go, you aren’t experiencing luxury. So we said we have to cap it. It has been difficult to persuade our shareholders to cap our expansion, particularly in the past few years, because we have been very aggressive and very successful. They ask us why we don’t just keep expanding. I tell them that the ultimate goal is to have a collection of individual properties rather than a chain. Each hotel is one of a kind and not part of a standardized product line. We have been hoteliers since 1897, and we will never have more hotels than the age of our company.

When you look at the way technology has affected the industry, do you worry that it has gone too far and is going to replace what hospitality is known for, which is the human interaction? How do you make sure you are offering enough technology but aren’t losing the personal touch?

Obviously our business is about service. Convenience is one thing, but service is another. Do we actually need a doorman to say hello if we have an automatic door or a concierge to provide services if guests can get what they need on the Internet? I think providing luxury means that you, by all means, give people options. There is more and more loneliness in this world, because people have the capacity to interact in total anonymity, and they lose the capacity to properly interact with people. We will not encourage that. We will make technology available, but we’ll definitely encourage personal interaction. That’s why people sit in lobbies and sip tea and watch people go by – they want to see people.

As a hotel business, you are very ingrained in the communities where you are. Is it important, from a corporate point of view, to drive through the organization the ideas of social responsibility and community involvement?

Absolutely. I think a hotel, especially the number-one hotel in town, is a part of the local community. When people show their cities, they say, this is the church, this is the synagogue, this is the famous museum, this is the famous bridge, and so on. They say, this is our famous hotel. We want the lobby of our hotel to be like a village square in ancient times, where social life happens. We don’t want to have a totally segregated clientele, which you see sometimes in some very heavily branded hotels. We believe that it is extremely important that the local community embraces the hotel. It has to become a social, cultural, and business venue for the local community to intermix with the guests.