Crystalbrook Collection recently celebrated five years in business and took the opportunity to bring 30 of its key leaders together to talk strategy. Chief Executive Geoff York spoke to Ruth Hogan about how far the start-up has come, and how it’s investing in digital, sustainability and mental health initiatives to drive the next chapter.
Crystalbrook has just undergone a major digital transformation. What difference will this make to your customer experience?
This is a seven-figure investment for us that will really elevate how we do business.
It’s about knowing who the customer is, treating them like an individual – like we know them – and personalising the experience for them.
Retail does it so well. If you get to the shopping cart and decide for whatever reason to jump off without completing the transaction, that’s the end of the journey. With the really good online retailers, you’ll get a text three hours later [prompting you to complete the transaction].
The next day, you’ll get another one offering another 5% discount if you proceed. It’s all automated; that’s where Salesforce is going to take us.
This is still a bit unique in the Australian hospitality space – not many have taken this on board. The hotel industry is always behind what’s happening in other industries, but this is going to push us to the forefront.
You’ve recently launched Meet Mindfully, tapping into the rising trend for work wellbeing by facilitating meetings of purpose and value. How important is wellness to the business in terms of both the guest and employee experience?
Coming out of COVID, meetings business is very strong. It’s what’s driving hotel recovery this year – domestic ‘bleisure’ and meetings.
Meet Mindfully is about personalising the meeting experience with different activities that you can do at each location such as gin making at a distillery in Byron, forest bathing, yoga, sound healing, and laughter meditation.
There needs to be a big focus on mental hygiene [in the aftermath of COVID]. In years to come, there’s going to be a lot of talk about the mental health issues that have taken place and the increase in youth suicide.
We added a mental health awareness element to our response to COVID. We partnered with Beyond Blue and Indigo Project. If you booked directly with us, a donation was made directly to both of those organisations to support their mental health activities. We raised about $30,000 for Beyond Blue and a similar amount for Indigo Project.
We also have an Earth Advocacy Day which allows each of our team members an extra paid day off per year to do something in the name of sustainability – whether it’s environmental or mindfulness.
Crystalbrook’s Responsible Luxury ethos has been a key part of its offering since day one. What sustainability initiatives are in the works at the moment?
We’re working with Earth Check, which is an Australian scientific benchmarking and accreditation body based in Brisbane but with a global footprint.
We’ve signed up to them to provide us with a measurement of the initiatives that we’ve been undertaking in the hotels. We do believe that when staying with us, there’s going to be less impact on the environment, through the way that we operate our hotels, but I’ve realised that we need we need a scientific approach to measure what we’ve done and how it differs to a normal hotel that doesn’t do any of that.
They’ve got some great hotel partners around the world like Kempinski so there’s a sharing of ideas – we’re always looking for more inspiration as to what we can be doing.
Stuart Moore, who’s the global founder of Earth Check, happened to be in Brisbane when we were having our meeting recently and he came and spoke to our people.
We also launched a partnership late last year with the University of Newcastle, which is right beside Crystalbrook Kingsley, where we fund a scholarship for students studying sustainability. It felt like a natural fit for us.
What about development plans? How are you planning to grow Crystalbrook’s footprint in the coming years?
Over the last three years, we’ve opened three hotels – Crystalbrook Flynn in Cairns, a 311-room hotel; Crystalbrook Vincent, which is a hotel we purchased in Brisbane and rebranded in July last year; and Crystalbrook Kingsley in Newcastle, which opened in June last year.
We’ve now got seven hotels, 1300 rooms across the group per night, and we own them all. We’re often described as a developer-owner, but we’re also an operator of our own hotels under our own brand. We’re not totally unique, but there’s not many like us in Australia.
The future for us in terms of locations is we’re looking for another Sydney hotel – CBD or harbour located; Melbourne – we need a presence there; and then New Zealand. We’ve been looking at capital cities, Auckland, Queenstown, and Wellington, so I think that’s very much on the cards for next year.
I’ve always been a great believer in quality over quantity in terms of hotels for us. It must be the right hotel; it must fit the brand and complement what we’ve got already. The target is one or two hotels a year, but that could change if the right opportunities come along. I’d like to think within the next three years, we get to double digits in terms of numbers of hotels.