How have your experiences as a luxury traveller inspired your business decisions with the Trump Hotel Collection?
I think that exposure to different cultures, different countries, different ways of doing things, does nothing but heighten your own sense of what’s the best, what’s the right way to do things. I think being open minded to what you experience during travels is incredibly important. Every time I travel I learn something, I see something, and I get inspired. I think it’s really core to our hotel company to be highly contextual in terms of each of our properties to be incredibly sensitive to the cultures in which we’re building them, and to make sure we’re responsive to what people in those markets want from a luxury experience. So there’s a standardized high quality and there’s an expectation of excellence, but each of the aspects feels very, intrinsically right within the context of the local market it’s built in.
And is there a specific trip or experience you had that you can speak about?
So many. When I come here as well Dubai is incredible in that inspires you to be bold: buildings are taller they’re shinier, they’re more exciting, there’s more energy here. People here are very passionate, they have high expectations, and they have bold visions. Really the only limiting factors are gravity and imagination. So that’s a great environment in which to build.
Could you tell us a little bit about the up and coming hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan and why you decided to invest in the region?
Yes so we have a Hotel Trump International, Hotel Baku that’s going to be opening in the fall (2015) so we’re very excited about that. It’s been a wonderful market, there’s a huge opportunity to develop a truly luxury property for that particular city in that particular market. We are going to have incredible meeting and banquet facilities because that’s something that is currently absent in Baku, and there’s so many business travellers who are coming through for conferences and for meetings, and we’re going to be strongly targeting them as well as the transient guest who’s going to Baku to visit and for sporting events, obviously like the one that’s upcoming. It’s a very special property and we’re incredibly excited about it.
Will the new hotel exude a sense of place or will it be similar to an American Trump Hotel like Chicago or NYC?
It will be both. It’s very grand but it’s, you know, as we were talking about before, it’s important to feel contextual, so it’s striking that balance that’s key to the success of every project.
How do you define luxury?
Luxury is about quality; it’s about product. A lot of people market that they’re luxury. They spend a lot of money on collateral materials, on information, on selling the product without spending the money on the product itself. Whether that is in apparel and accessories or whether that is in real estate. But luxury isn’t just the narrative; it’s the actual asset. And its important to be obsessed with the details and the execution, because that’s what also differentiates the greatest and the mediocre, and even the greatest and the pretty good. I also think that luxury is something that’s always evolving. It evolves; it varies across markets in terms of what people’s standards are, and what their expectations are. There is always an importance of location in the real estate world, so you can’t really have something. You can build a luxury building, but the end user won’t view it to be a complete luxury experience if it’s in a tertiary location within the context of an urban environment. So that’s a core principle.
Are there any destinations that you’re looking to visit, any bucket list destinations you haven’t been to yet?
I’ve never been to Morocco, and it’s a place I’d very much like to visit. I’ve never been to the pyramids, and I’ve been to Egypt but not as a tourist so that’s something that I’d very much like to do. There are several places in South America I’d like to visit as well.
What other destinations are you excited about opening up in 2015, and the years to come?
We have a very big year coming up. So we’re opening Baku in the fall. We’re going to be opening up an unbelievable hotel in Rio Di Janeiro in the early spring of 2016 right on the waterfront, it’s spectacular. We’re opening a hotel in Vancouver, Canada in the late spring of 2016, we’re opening Trump DC in Washington, right on Pennsylvania Avenue in the summer of 2016. So we have a busy eight months ahead.