New Luxury Resorts Target Executive Board Meetings

Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. last month announced it is building a 126-room resort called Molasses Reef on West Caicos, an uninhabited, 6,000-acre island in the Turks & Caicos in the Caribbean. According to Ritz-Carlton president and COO Simon Cooper, the resort will welcome small executive board meetings and retreats, but avoid larger, more formal group and incentive business. Ritz-Carlton thus became the latest deluxe hotel chain to target small, high-end groups ill-suited to traditional, full-service resorts with elaborate ballrooms and breakout space.

"We're looking for the resort to be intimate in feel, unlike some of our other resorts, which are built on a different scale," Cooper said. "The developers' intention is very much to keep the project as low-impact and environmentally friendly as possible, in keeping with the pristine beauty of the site."

More than 90 percent of the island will be left permanently undeveloped. "As a result, we're promoting Molasses Reef as a kind of private-label resort," Cooper said. "The Ritz-Carlton name, in fact, will be a sub-brand." The project is scheduled for completion in 2007.

As Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Mandarin Oriental Hotels and other deluxe chains plan resorts in more remote, exotic locales, they are foregoing the prerequisite that developments include extensive meeting space and related facilities. "At our price point, customers may put a higher value on privacy and exclusivity," said Scott Woroch, Four Seasons senior vice president of development for Asia/Pacific. "We have a growing portfolio of resort hotels, but in each case the scale of the meetings and incentive component depends on the location and the projected size of the hotel. Certainly, meeting space is always considered."

Four Seasons in 2004 opened the 153-room Four Seasons Costa Rica at Peninsula Papagayo that fits the low-impact, intimate mold. On the other hand, the 242-room Four Seasons Whistler Resort in British Columbia, Canada, which also opened in 2004, is more of a traditional resort.

What little meeting space there is increasingly is designed to double as high-end catering space. "Incentive groups, for example, might not be oriented towards sit-down meetings, but might want to hold smaller banquets and formal dinners," Woroch said.

Depending on the climate, a significant portion of this meeting and catering space will be outdoors. "Outdoor function space could be perfectly suitable for an evening event for a small group," Woroch said. "It gives the event a sense of place and uniqueness."

Wolfgang Hultner, CEO of the Americas for Mandarin Oriental Hotels, described small-scale resorts as hideaways. "Travelers to our hotels tend to be fairly sophisticated and well-traveled, so part of the appeal of a destination is its uniqueness," Hultner said.

In terms of size, 100-to-150 rooms with limited meeting space would be ideal. "Huge meeting space inadvertently can destroy the atmosphere you're looking to create," Hultner said. "A small meeting room might suffice because it can accommodate boardroom meetings and private dinners."

Given the seasonality of many resort locations, group bookings may be more prevalent in the shoulder or offseason, when rates are more attractive. Mandarin Oriental late this year will open a hideaway resort on the Riviera Maya south of Cancun in Mexico.

In resort development today, the square footage that might have been intended as meeting space has been reassigned to the spa.

"Spa is pretty much a given at this point, regardless of whether the resort guest is a leisure traveler or a meeting attendee," said Chris Cahill, president and COO of Fairmont Hotels & Resorts. "For customers, spa pretty much has become synonymous with deluxe and the upper upscale segments. Meeting planners increasingly are booking blocks of time at the spa for attendees in much the way that they would block tee times for golf."

The appeal is to men as well as women. Particularly in Asian cultures, in which there's a long history of spa-related services, "spa is absolutely a high priority in resort development," Four Seasons' Woroch said.

"For example, in our new resort in Langkawi in Malaysia, which opens in April, we have a dedicated spa room that's part of the guest room," Woroch said. "Guests staying in that room essentially will have their own private spa."

For John Wallis, senior vice president of marketing for Hyatt Hotels Corp., the more apt analogy for today's spa is a hotel or resort's destination restaurant.

"The restaurant can be so successful that it takes the property to a new level in the guest's mind," Wallis said. "The same is now true of the spa."