Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

When you build a house, a house is not a collection of parts. A house is a collection of parts that have been put together in a certain way. You got to connect this to that. This has to support that. You’ve got to trim that to fit this. So I’m going to give you a story of one company, and how they used all of this to be able to get from almost bankrupt to now dominating their category of the industry. They did it in five years.

The story is about a company called Naiade. Naiade Resorts is a Mauritius based company that had nine resorts when I first met them. After the global financial crisis, they were on the verge of bankruptcy, as you can see. The global financial crisis kept Europeans from flying on vacation. It caused occupancy to drop like a rock. Room rates went down so low that even if a guest came, they were losing money and they were not financed to be able to make it through the storm. 

They reached out to a gentleman named Paul Jones, who I knew from two previous resorts where he used to work, and he was a real legend in the industry, and they convinced him to come in and turn it around. First thing he said, “To turn it around, you have to give me permission to make big changes.” They said, “Paul, if you don’t make big changes, we’re going out of business.” So he came in and this is what Naiade promotions looked like. 

What do you see? Blue sea, white sand, green trees and a swimming pool. How many of the other 249 resorts in Mauritius do you think could also show blue sea, white sand, green trees and a swimming pool? All of them. Now, when I look outside at some of these booths and I see some of the posters talking about their product, I look at it and I think, I wonder what their competition could say. Similar product. He said, “We’ve got a problem here. We’re so busy talking about ourselves that we’re not putting the focus where it needs to be. Let’s turn it around.” The first thing he did was he said, “All of our imagery now has to be guest-focused, because that’s why we’re here.”

Okay. Then he said “The name Naiade has now been so associated with history that the name itself has become a roadblock. We’re a three and a half star brand. We got to get five star room rates.That means you’ve got to charge more. We got to get occupancy that’s higher than the industry average. That means you’ve got to attract more people. We’ve got to create a brand that is so appealing and espectacular. We gotta turn this around.” 

So they came up with a new brand name. They called it ‘Lux*’ “Lux* Resorts.” You see that little asterisk? What that meant was lighter, brighter, less deluxe, more delight. Now, why did they say that? Because they were broke. They had no money. So, how do you get your room rate from three and a half star to five star room rate, if you don’t have money to renovate everything? If you don’t have money to make everything more expensive. Well, if you could create a service experience that was so spectacular, the people said, “Oh my gosh!”, you could actually do that without more money. I’ll give you an example. One of the things they did, they went in and they took all the stuff out of the room and painted it all white. Lighter, brighter. 

Then they got to know each guest. For example, some people are what’s called a “foodie”. Do you have that in India? Do you know what a foodie is? What’s a foodie? Somebody who loves food, right?  If somebody was a foodie, who did they meet within 4 hours of arriving at the property, The chef. Who found out what? Right. When they came back from the pool in the middle of the afternoon, what was in their room? Something the chef made for them. Then when they came back from dinner, what was in their room? A little something the chef made for them. The next day and the next day and the next day. 

Now, was the chef doing that for every guest? No, because not every guest was a foodie. They had another guest, you know what she loved? Fresh flowers. I mean, it just meant everything to her that somebody could come along and put a nice fresh flower there. So what did they do ? Every day, they put in new, fresh flowers. Now, what did they do with yesterday’s flowers? Did they throw them out? No, they put them in somebody else’s room. But for him or her,fresh flowers, fresh flowers. By the way, you’ve never had a resort do that for you before. The foodie has never had that kind of attention from the chef before.

They had somebody there who was an exercise fitness nut. You know what they did? They put one of the bicycles to stay in the guy’s room. They didn’t do that for everybody. If they did it for me, I’d have a heart attack. But they did it for the exercise nut. 

Now, you tell me, what kind of a review are those guests going to put on TripAdvisor? What kind of feedback are they going to give to their travel agent and their tour operator? Do you think: “Lighter, brighter. “Less deluxe, more delight” “More personalized” ”Five star service” in what used to be a three and a half star brand? Are you guys with me?