Luxury means different things to different people, so how does one teach luxury?

If you’ve been spending any time on social media, you may have noticed “a little thing” happening, as they say on Instagram. Based on anecdotal evidence (read: Reels and TikTok), it seems everyone below 35 now flies business class and holidays at swanky beach villas with their own private pools. Luxury, it appears, has become more accessible. It’s developed into more about fitting in than standing out from the crowd.

Certainly, luxury means different things to different people. “At its most basic level, luxury is anything that’s inaccessible and extraordinary, and unnecessary,” said Dr Florent Girardin, an associate professor at EHL Hospitality Business School where he teaches hospitality luxury brand management.

While I understand the concept of brand management, I tell Dr Girardin, how exactly do you teach luxury, a concept so intangible and which differs based on our life experiences and individual standards and expectations?

“I start with defining what is and isn’t luxury,” he answered during our interview in an EHL classroom that looks out to a scenic mountain range in Lausanne, Switzerland. “Luxury is an evolving concept. It varies from culture to culture. So, I try to base it on the most recent research and then we study the different dimensions of luxury which helps distinguish real luxury brands from non-luxury brands. It’s not a black-and-white concept. It’s a continuum.”

STUDYING LUXURY IN THE LAP OF LUXURY

As far as universities go, EHL is its own luxury experience. Founded in 1893, it is the world’s first and oldest hospitality management school with its flagship campus in Lausanne (it has two other campuses in Passugg, Switzerland and Singapore). The sprawling Lausanne campus feels more like swish airport than tertiary institution, with up to 4,000 impeccably dressed students from 126 nationalities traversing the 80,000-sq-m campus on which there is a vegan restaurant, food court, tennis courts, 25-metre swimming pool, a Montreux Jazz Cafe, and even a Michelin-star restaurant.

“Here in the school, you get to experience luxury. It’s not something that other schools offer. We have on-campus luxury experiences like Berceau des Sens (the Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant) and luxury companies like Chopard and Saint Laurent who come on campus to meet and recruit students, giving them the possibility to work as student ambassadors,” said EHL Group’s CEO Markus Venzin.

LUXURY 101

As with any subject, nailing the fundamentals is key. Dr Girardin said, “Once students understand the basics, then we can start thinking about the future. We do many workshops to try to understand the trends and look at objective, factual data to make educated guesses about what the future of luxury might look like…

“Then we have creativity courses where after [students gain] a good understanding of the luxury industry based on research, they can learn about the creative process which will allow them to create the future of luxury.”

PERSONALISING LUXURY

Still, the wildly varying expectations of luxury means it is difficult to tailor its delivery to a large audience. To wit: The Asian expectation of luxury can differ greatly from that of Western expectations. This divide is often demonstrated in the hospitality industry where the contrasts between a five-star hotel in Southeast Asia and in Europe can be stark. Experts say this boils down to cultural differences.

“How we perceive luxury hospitality is very different,” opined Dr Girardin. “For example, in Europe, we like to have real conversations with hotel employees, eye-to-eye conversations that allow us to learn from them. I think Asian culture is more subservient. Both are different ways to approach the client and to have a different type of relationship with the guest.”

Dr Peter Varga, an anthropologist and assistant professor at EHL, who teaches cross-cultural hospitality management and sustainable hospitality culture, added that the hospitality industry could use training in cultural differences. Luxury is, after all, about personalisation.

“In Asian society, hierarchy is more important than here in Switzerland, for example… so maybe the feeling of being served as someone important in a hotel is more important for Asians or Middle Easterners, than for the Swiss. A typical example might be a Middle Easterner who wants to talk to someone about an issue in the hotel. They would not want to talk to just anyone; they’d want to speak to someone with status rather than someone at reception,” he explained.

In academic terms, this concept is known as power distance. In a model developed by Dutch social scientist Geert Hofstede, power distance is defined as the degree to which members of a society accept differences in power and authority. People in societies with high power distance (for example, China, Mexico and Brazil) are likelier to accept inequality and the fact that there are powerful people who are entitled to special benefits. Conversely, people from low power distance societies such as Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada, tend to consider that all members are equal.

Personalisation is even more challenging when there are strict operating procedures to follow. “Many big hotel chains are based on Western values. There are rules for what you can and cannot do in the SOPs (standard operation procedures),” said Dr Varga.

“But luxury is also about how you resolve problems and conflicts between people of different cultural backgrounds. Not everyone would be happy with an upgrade [as a solution], for example… So, if a staff member is not trained in that regard, then you can create conflict because you don’t know about that culture.”

THE FUTURE OF LUXURY

In his EHL classrooms, Dr Varga dedicates six hours to cultural intelligence where students are put in situational role play to study and present their findings. Often, students find themselves stumped by the cultural nuances depicted in these exercises. This, Dr Varga said, unravels new learnings about how being culturally intelligent can be a game changer for interpersonal relationships in the hospitality industry.

“My hope is that when they eventually go into the workplace and find themselves dealing with different people, they’ll say, ‘let me go back to see how I can interpret that in a better way’.”

In this manner, Dr Varga, Dr Girardin and their colleagues are training a new generation of hospitality professionals to enrich the luxury industry with greater and more meaningful roads to personalisation — the ultimate luxury indeed.