‘It’s what makes us human’: Hyatt boss eyes post-Covid demand for ‘being with each other’

Up the stairs, round the corner, down some steps and I am in one of London’s truly special places. It’s the Masonic Temple, hidden away inside the Andaz hotel at Liverpool Street.

The windowless room is untouched, exactly as it was when it opened for the Freemasons’ ritual ceremonies in 1912.

Around the walls are hand-carved mahogany seats, there are leather and gold thrones at either end, a chequered marble floor, columns made from 12 types of marble, bronze candelabras with clawed feet, a blue and gold ceiling with a five-pointed star and zodiac symbols, even an organ. It’s spectacular, grade II listed, and utterly incongruous, located deep in a luxury hotel.

Javier Aguila, president of Hyatt Hotels, for Europe, Africa and Middle East – or EAME – is waiting for me. “Welcome to London’s best-kept secret,” he says, smiling.

Previous owners found the “Grecian Temple” when they renovated the hotel. Today, it’s yours to hire for photo shoots, dinners and “creative brainstorming”, and it has hosted events with Paloma Faith, Alice Cooper and Lady Gaga. Quite what the original users would make of Lady Gaga is impossible to say.

It is, we agree, a remarkable setting for our cup of coffee.

The Andaz is one of 205 hotels on Javier’s watch. That equates to 45,780 rooms and 18,000 employees. Worldwide, Hyatt has 1,263 hotels with 304,108 rooms and more than 189,000 staff.

In all, the privately owned US group operates a whopping 28 different brands, of which Andaz is one. They’re all at the top end, ranging from Park Hyatt, Grand Hyatt, Hyatt Regency to more style-conscious Thompson, funkier Andaz, and resorts and spas like Dreams and Secrets.

“We’ve the biggest portfolio of luxury hotels in the world,” he says. “But everywhere you go, regardless of the brand, you will find it’s a Hyatt, offering the same culture, the same great attitude to caring for people.” He shrugs. “It’s what we do.”

Javier is not your typical hospitality chief. He didn’t work his way up through the hotel and travel trades but came to the industry via stints in private equity and management consulting, at The Carlyle Group, McKinsey and Booz Allen Hamilton.

That gave him a perspective from the other side, of being a frequent stayer. He knows what guests are expecting, what they’re looking for. But he’s also, thanks to his PE and consulting experience, able to apply firm discipline and controls – things that can sometimes go missing in the sector.

As well, he has the experience of being a hotel entrepreneur, a risk-taker, as the founder of Alua Hotels & Resorts – the all-inclusive chain of hotels which he sold to Apple Leisure in 2019. Subsequently, Apple Leisure was acquired by Hyatt in 2021.

He’s 47, based in Zurich at Hyatt’s EAME head office, but spends “three weeks a month travelling”. He keeps himself fit with games of padel, occasional basketball, running and sessions in the gym.

He needs that energy: Hyatt is a corporation that continues to expand at a phenomenal rate. “Last year marked our sixth consecutive year as the fastest-growing hospitality brand in the world.” Its pipeline currently comprises 580 new hotels or 117,000 rooms. In the UK alone, Hyatt owns 14 hotels, with a further eight scheduled.

All this against a background of a worldwide health emergency, war in Ukraine and economies beset by inflation. In his patch, in EAME, however, “business is now back to 2019 levels.”

Far from being vulnerable to crisis, he says, the luxury market is proving “very resilient. If you just look at the pandemic, bit by bit the rebound has been very strong.”

In those Covid years: “People developed Zoom fatigue. Zoom worked out well at the start, for three reasons. It fulfilled people’s need for urgency, relationships were already built so it did not matter they were meeting virtually, and nobody knew how long Covid-19 would last.”

But, he says: “The minute the pandemic ended, people wanted to get together. They wanted to meet new colleagues they’d not met in person before; they wanted to recreate that bond you get from people being together.”

There has been a change. What they’ve witnessed at Hyatt, he says, is that “spending a day travelling to attend just one meeting is mostly lost”. Zoom remains ideal for that. “But people are looking for conferences and events that are spread over several days. They want that physical presence and contact – it’s what makes us human. Connectivity is crucial. People want the experience of being with each other.”

At the same time, he says: “Society was, and is, moving from owning things to experiencing things. People want to meet new people, experience new places, sample new food.”

That shift has picked up, post-pandemic. “It’s added to the underlying strength of travel. Destinations where people want to go have properly recovered.” He grins. Hyatt, it goes without saying, is in many of those must-visit locations.

The first Hyatt was Hyatt House, a motel near Los Angeles airport. It opened in 1954 and was bought by the Pritzker family three years later. The Pritzkers still hold a majority stake in what is now a vast publicly-owned company, headquartered in Chicago.

They went on to develop a line in airport hotels and then in city centres. Hyatts spread across the US, famous for their large atriums. They were very much a US brand serving US clientele, and that continued when they ventured overseas, so Hyatt focused on places that attracted lots of Americans. That emphasis, says Javier, has altered. “We don’t want to lose our US customers, but we want to capture regional travellers. The potential is huge – we can more than double our presence across EAME. We want to make Hyatt a brand that is relevant to EAME.”

He beams again: “Ours is the most under-penetrated region in Hyatt.” In other words, there is enormous scope for expansion. “We want Hyatt recognised in the key cities and destinations in Europe, Africa and Middle East.”

But what makes a hotel a Hyatt, as opposed to another luxury marque? He nods. He says he could expand on what they call “The Hyatt Difference”, but the group CEO, Mark Hoplamazian, sums it up well: “We care for people so they can be at their best.”

What that means, Javier says, is about having “an eye for detail, for seeing a table that is dirty or a glass that is in the wrong place.” And that comes down to the staff, to their training and their motivation. “What makes a hotel is not the building but the soul of the people who work there. Design is important, don’t get me wrong. But 90 per cent of the time what makes a hotel different, what its success turns on, is its people.”

One recurring sore is air travel. “It’s very difficult to sell luxury hotels when the only way to journey is based on cost, on price.” He’d like to see airlines “offering a more value-added service”.

That side of the trip is not in his or Hyatt’s remit. You can’t help wishing it was – surely then, it really would improve.