Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio.
Well, it turns out that what Gen Z and millennials want when they take a vacation is a bit different than what previous generations we're looking for when they went on vacation. So bye bye clubs, Hello wellness clinics. That's the bet that our next guest is making. He's the CEO and chairman of SBE. It's hospitality group that manages
and operates hotels, restaurants, lounges and nightclubs. The company has partnered with Wyndham Hotels and Resorts to launch a new smart lifestyle brand called Project HQ Hotels and Resorts with us as SAMs Aeri and the chairman and CEO of SBE joining us from Miami. Sam, good to have you with us. I'm so interested in the differences between generations in terms of what they want when they go on vacation or or or when they're away from their homes.
Talk to us a little bit about what you found in these differences, the market research that you did and what you learned.
Thank you, Thank you for having me. No, it's been an interesting journey. I mean from a guy like me who started in the hotel business about twenty two years ago and I was building brands for myself. I don't
think we had a generation name. But back then we were admiring these new emerging category called boutique hotels and that was a very interesting, very very small lane that guys like Ian Schrager and Andre Belas and w had really formulated and it was very very you know, very unique for a traditional hotel operator or a big public company hotel company to understand that design, food and beverage, you know, at the highest level exclusivity in these hotels
were going to be you know, exactly what they are today in the world called lifestyle. And I think that same thinking right looking at things completely different and also trying to understand a new consumer for us at SBE because we built the largest lifestyle company in the world, forty one hotels around the world branded residential, and we
were building to an aging consumer like myself. But what we noticed about four or five years ago is that consumer, the fastest growing and most coveted consumer across the board, and hospitality were this next generation and to us, you know, building you know, for me as a forty eight year old, to try to identify what's important to somebody who's nineteen twenty twenty one all the way up to thirty five was probably not going to work. And I didn't have
the relevancy. So we decided to really kind of double click, as they say, or dive deep into the world, into their world, and to do that, we were able to really understand as a whole new language, a whole new language and relevancy and things that are important to this new upcoming consumer, the fastest growing consumer in hospitality globally.
And you know, we decided to really partner with the people that they think are important and understand the mindset from various different celebrities, YouTubers, entrepreneurs that are relevant in that world. And we've done that, I think, very convincingly and really understand that this new consumer has different KPIs,
different things that are important to them, authenticity, experience. They're not spending money on things that we were spending money on when we were growing up, like homes and cars, and they really want a really authentic voice and the only real brand that has spoken to them in the last five to ten years has been Airbnb, and that's
a very interesting way to look at their mindset. And with Project HQ, we really focused on building a very interesting ecosystem around multiple brands, multiple experiences.
Think maybe you could walk us through a few examples of what are we actually going to see in these new hotels and resorts, an example of what it looks like when a resort caters to the next generation Gen Z millennials. Does this mean, you know, more spas, more smoothie bars, maybe less nightclubs building in the hotel? What is this actually going to look like?
I think our perspective has been, you know, food is really the key of experiences in hotels, food, design, accessibility, and also authenticity, which is a big word, you know, but really authenticity means building brands that resonate with people that really stand for something right. So obviously for us, we've built a huge business in the past around full service and you know, very glitzy, glamory type environments. Those
don't really we've seen it in our clubs and restaurants. Curly, they don't resonate to that next demographic, So we've kind of pivoted into building more. We call it democratizing food. You know, we've gone to all of our James Very chefs and we've asked them to create a premium QSR version of what they've done for us in full service.
We've now partnered with fifteen YouTube phenomenons, you know, you know people at entrepreneurs that that these people follow, they connect with and we've created food brands with those folks. I think, you know, I think the property scale also has has a lot. I mean, we were now within our pipeline looking at resorts in Europe, in the Caribbean, urban US markets that are smaller, that don't have three hundred four hundred rooms, but also have you know, a
sense of you know, a sense that isn't overwhelming. And we're layering in and a lot of our plan is done through conversion. We're taking old buildings and bringing them to life and and I think from our perspective injecting them. I think you led the segment with wellness. I think it's not necessarily just about wellness. It's about longevity, it's
about understanding, you know, technology. I mean a lot of the things that we're doing are partnering with companies with MRI scanning, bone density scanning, giving the tools to better understand what's going on on the inside of your body, so then you can affect kind of the long standing health benefits, which I think is very important to this demographic and psychographic more importantly. So that's kind of how we look at it. It's a comprehensive approach. There isn't
a magic bullet. I think it's just a commitment to authenticity to this group with people they trust.
I'm wondering how you're thinking about the demographics of the people you're trying to attract. Right now, we only have about a minute left, Sam, but we do hear about the way that younger consumers in this country are struggling and they don't necessarily have the discretionary income to spend on stuff like this. How are you thinking about that just in the last forty five seconds we have.
Yeah, listen, I think from a perspective of discretionary income, the subset is they're spending more money and experiences than they aren't traditional So the money that they do have, their spending it and experiences. So we're trying to create very accessible experiences from a price point from the hotel room all the way down to kind of the common areas and areas of the resort or hotel, and ultimately I think it's really it's really we're investing in the future.
It's fifty six percent of today's traveler or under thirty five years old, so we're investing in the future. And a partnership with Windham gives us one hundred and five million members, of which a lot of these people are in that subset already that we can help unlock with our with our hotel partners and assets all around the world.
Sam's Aarien is the chairman and CEO of SB, the hospitality group that manages and operates hotels, restaurants, lounges and nightclubs. He joins US from Miami. They partnered with Wyndham Hotels and Resorts to launch a new smart lifestyle brand called Project HQ Hotels and Residences