The Raffles Singapore is hallowed ground for the hospitality industry. A pilgrimage to there should be on everyone’s bucket list, but with such a storied past this can create an almost impassable bar for guest expectations. Yet from our latest visit, exceeding expectations is nevertheless the outcome for every guest, and therein lies a world of instruction on how to operate an ultraluxury hotel.
Primarily, what we emphasize from this latest stay is that trust plays an ever-critical role in luxury operations. Guests are trusting this 115-key property with the most important moments of their lives – weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, reunions or important meetings. Service has to be both flawless as well as delivered with an exceptional sense of place that surprises, delights and helps to form unique memories.
It’s often said that hospitality is joy at scale, but the Raffles Singapore demonstrates that this isn’t enough for the ultraluxury level and for those properties that truly want to distinguish themselves from other brands. Yes, generating joy is a venerable outcome, but for a hotel that specializes in the delivery of peak experiences, what’s also needed is storytelling through strong, unified themes and narratives that enchant guests by enveloping them into an irreplicable, and often fantastical, setting. This is but one of the reasons why the Raffles Singapore was recently awarded the sixth best hotel in the world by the World’s 50 Best Hotels 2024, in addition to innumerable other accolades over the years and decades.
Helping us to understand the nuances of how a timeless property like this operates was Leenu Tarani, Assistant Director of Marketing Communications for the Raffles Singapore. From our time, there are numerous takeaways about the emotional impact a great hotel can have, the importance of stewardship and how luxury hotels are adapting to new shifts in demand across different segments.
A time-honored heritage
Named after Sir Stamford Raffles, the British statesman who founded Singapore in 1819, the hotel in fact had nothing to do with the empire of its day. Instead, the namesake comes from the Sarkies Brothers, four Armenian merchants and hoteliers who didn’t think at the time that their last name had as much brand cachet as the colony’s founder in December 1887 when the hotel first opened.
Now well over a hundred years in operation, the hotel has gone through numerous renovations, restorations and expansions, where it now takes up an entire city block with multiple wings, courtyards, multiple enclosed event lawns, seven restaurants and an arcade of high-end watch, jewelry and clothing shops – plus a Macallan store for whiskey aficionados looking to take in some rare casks.
The latest property reimagining completed in August 2019 emphasized invisible, modern technology in every guestroom and a more flexible configuration for the Grand Lobby where tables from the adjoining Tiffin Room flow through into the opulent, multi-story foyer. With the Tiffin Room serving breakfast and North Indian cuisine for lunch and dinner, and with Afternoon Tea served at the Grand Lobby, this augments the arrival experience by creating a social atmosphere that never disrupts the overarching sense of tranquility that permeates the entire property. (And as an aside, the Mee Goreng here is a godsend, with every Singaporean restaurant or hawker stand having a different take on this Indonesian fried noodle dish.)
The word ‘opulent’ isn’t wholly accurate in describing the arrival experience, though. Instead, one is greeted by the dashing, energetic, Sikh-dressed Raffles Doormen with a firm handshake and all-knowing sense of every movement around before passing into the enormous, atrium-style lobby with white-clad walls punctuated by the Grandfather Clock, the oldest piece in the hotel, historic artwork and upholstered mahogany furnishings. It’s magnificent, sure, but also understated, never trying to strain the eyes with any sense of maximalist design. Every piece of furniture is thoughtfully placed and spaced, giving the interiors a breezy sense of calm befitting the current desire for quiet luxury.
Besides just this categorization of the main gathering point for hotel guest activity, it’s well known that the Raffles Singapore has played host to countless heads of state, dignitaries, actors and celebrities over the decades. So much so that the team has codified these stays through an entire section adorned with archival photography while other artifacts are staggered across the many public corridors.
And of all the dining options to call out, the most famous is the Long Bar where the Singapore Sling was invented in 1915 as a cocktail that would allow women to invisibly drink alcohol in public – a taboo at the time. With memorabilia honoring this creation and other famous cocktails devised within this one bar, it’s common for there to be a lineup at 11am when the bar opens with a mix of hotel guests, locals, tourists staying at other hotels and cruise visitors flocking over for a slurp of history right after the boat has docked. Indeed, the hotel is open as a tourist attraction to the public, with the hotel resident sections heavily securitized to keep this traffic to the restaurants and arcade shops.
With so much heritage all around, what Tarani and others emphasized was that cherishing the past requires effort each and every day. It is not something that one can simply set and forget. Rather, the word ‘time-honored’ implies upkeep every day, both to ensure the physical assets live up their reputation via impeccable cleanliness standards and thorough inspections, as well as an appreciation at all levels of the company culture for the significance of a hotel that’s steeped in history and the responsibility of being stewards.
And still innovation
From the tremendous work of numerous teams across multiple generations, the Raffles Singapore has taken on a life of its own, with one eye firmly on the past yet still allowing for contemporary updates. As a living, breathing character in guests’ lives, the property has kept ‘heritage at the heart’ of all operations to ensure that the storytelling always comes to the forefront.
Yet as a living entity unto itself, change is always necessary and the property must continue to innovate. Framing this another way, though, ‘innovation’ is simply the real-time creation of yet more history. While a century ago, innovation meant creative cocktails to buck social norms, today it’s more likely to imply technology
One aspect that we saw here was a new treatment in the Raffles Spa where two portable photobiomodulation (PBM) units could be wheeled into one of the treatment rooms to augment a massage with red-light therapy which works to rejuvenate the dermal layer of the skin. Still, as hotel guests are visiting this ultraluxury hotel to share a special occasion in their lives, the focus has to remain on delivering an overall feeling of peacefulness, rather than a more clinic, longevity-driven experience. To this end, innovation within spa has meant setting up a full-service signature couples treatment menu with champagne service for a half-day experience with the couples treatment room that has its own private hot tub and sauna.
Innovation also means adaptation. For instance, even as the pandemic fades into memory, it’s still shocking to hear that the Raffles Singapore never once closed its doors during this tumultuous time. First, they hosted exiles who couldn’t leave the country due to flight restrictions during the initial circuit breaker. Then they pivoted to staycations for locals who needed some respite from the lockdowns.
And now, they’ve back into catering to luxury guests who are just now rediscovering Southeast Asia, with a healthy mix of guests from the United States, Australia, Europe and the United Kingdom, as well as fresh demand coming from China as that nation finally opens back up. All told, there’s not really a low season for a property that has so much happening on premises and with so much to offer every guest.
Stewarding Singaporean hospitality
Looking to the future, the Raffles Singapore team has committed to many other ventures that will help it continue in its role as a steward of luxury hospitality on the world stage. And this is a lofty goal nowadays in a country that has given the world many other prominent luxury brands – Capella, COMO, Pan Pacific and Shangri-La, to name four – who have all learned from the hospitality institution that is Raffles and are now strong competitors.
Like many other advanced economies, Singapore has a limit to its labor supply. In response to this, Tarani commented that the hotel is focused on reskilling by allowing associates to learn within multiple roles to discover where their true passions are. This structure of lateral mobility represents the future of work within a hotel organization because it recognizes the value of retaining talent for the long-term while also allowing for personal growth and continuing professional development (CPD).
Related and also propelled by this shift towards more CPD and support for reskilling, the hotel is now engaging in far more multi-property group blocks in order to better facilitate events in light of the tremendous growth that MICE travel is forecasted to enjoy for the next few years at least. In a word, this means more ‘clustering’ of management.
Within the hotel, sales, marketing and communications now work closer together than ever before to coordinate on segmentation strategies, to personalize stays and to execute on the broader commercial goals. This clustering help teams develop their skills by exposing them to a variety of hotel operations while also helping facilitate the growth of hospitality for the city as a whole by ensuring that every manager and associate has all the right skills to assume leadership roles.
To end on yet one more word to remember, what struck us most about the Raffles Singapore was its purposeful efforts to ‘cultivate’ true hospitality. This is a place with profound storytelling, but it continues to lead our industry only because it diligently honors its past while still innovating and pivoting operations as new trends emerge. Even as the whole of Singapore evolves into an ultramodern, progressive and tech-forward urban paradise, this property’s gleaming white walls and colonial architecture help to ground and celebrate the city’s emergence on the global stage.
For every hotelier who has read this far, we ask: how are you embracing, enriching and stewarding the local land? And to circle back to the opening, how does your hotel amplify the most important moments of their lives, which may likely be occurring under your roof?
As we enter a new post-material world, cultivating a sense of heritage and stewardship is becoming a critical aspect for all hotels, not just luxury. It was an honor to experience the historic Raffles Singapore and to see how this world leader completes the admirable tasks of stewardship, storytelling and creating timeless memories for guests.
