Indie Lodging Congress Confab Palm Springs 2024 Recap

This past week, I was in Palm Springs for an event produced by the Independent Lodging Congress and wanted to summarize some of my takeaways for you.

Indie Lodging Congress Confab Palm Springs 2024 Event Recap

Independent Lodging Congress just produced the best hospitality event I've attended. Here are a few of the takeaways I had:

1) Events don't need to be boring! Andrew Benioff, Meg Gutowski, and the team at ILC thought about everything from the room's layout to the programming (including a fun sneaker competition) to the food and fashion that made people relax, have fun, and have better conversations than I've seen anywhere else.

2) The host hotel for an event matters a lot. Ace Hotel / Atelier Ace crushed it with their Palm Springs location.

It was my first visit to Palm Springs, and Ace delivered everything I hoped for and more by restoring a Howard Johnson motel built in 1965…

…and updating it with modern amenities like vegan diner food options in a restored former Denny’s restaurant:

3) A great hotel makes everything around it more valuable. Robin Kennedy at Montage talked about working with Brookfield to build the Pendry Manhattan West, which ended up making their retail spaces a lot more valuable.

4) Hire "lightning rods" - Peter Mack from Collective Retreats. We all know people power hospitality, so intentionally recruit people who are catalysts in your communities.

5) Sleep is important and growing more so. JD Velilla had an incredible panel on this, talking about the perspective change from sleep being the end of the day to the start of the next day. I'm thinking a lot about this and notice so much of the conversation around guest experience focusing here as well.

I encourage you to listen to my conversation from last week with Equinox Hotels CEO Chris Norton if you missed it for more on this:

6) Have a signature experience. Matt Mering at Outbound Hotels: "Ian Schrager had his lobbies. We have fire pits." Create a signature thing and build rituals for your guests.

7) Create more owners. Matt also talked about how they enable the "innkeeper mentality" by having a financial mechanism where their GMs aren't just told to "think like owners” - they have skin in the game as an owner would with the financial upside.

Listen to me talk more about this on the Hospitality Daily Podcast today

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