WW 09 - Places & Spaces: Safety, seclusion & intimacy
Caitlin Ramsdale on travel culture, wellness in hospitality, and reimagining spaces for wellbeing
Hello & welcome to the next edition of Wellwatching, an exploration of the evolving business and culture of wellness by me, Alex Grieves. If you’re new, have a read through previous interviews here.
This is a special edition, as it marks the first in my new newsletter mini-series that I’m calling Places & Spaces. In my journey exploring the wellness industry and how we seek to achieve wellbeing over the past few months - both within and beyond this newsletter - I keep returning to the places and spaces that act as the containers for our experience of ‘being well.’ They bring multiple aspects of wellbeing together - physical, emotional, mental; public and private; individual and communal - where the sum ultimately becomes greater than its parts. I’m fascinated by how places and spaces, both physical and digital, continue to evolve to help us feel well - which is what my conversations will focus on in the next few editions.
If you know anyone working at the intersection of wellbeing x placemaking, the built environment and/or urban planning who I should speak to, I’d love an introduction.
To kick this off, I had a great conversation with my friend Caitlin Ramsdale - a brilliant brand strategist-turned-hospitality consultant, whose work spans three continents and many high-profile hotel openings. We discussed Covid-19’s impact on travel culture, how travelers define ‘wellness’ now, and how hospitality spaces are being reimagined with guest wellbeing in mind.
Tell me a bit about yourself: what do you do?
I am a hospitality and branding consultant. I’ve spent the last decade working mainly in travel, in Singapore, New York, and now London. Currently I’m the managing director of Kid & Coe, a family-friendly platform for handpicked short-term rentals.
What led you to hospitality?
My dad is an architect, and perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt like hotels were such special places. After working for five years as a brand strategist with Ogilvy & Mather New York, I felt the urge to shape more physical, end-to-end experiences for people. This was at the dawn of the user experience revolution, when I saw a lot of smart people moving away from advertising into user experience or design, where there was more emphasis on creating a great product. Hotels just felt like the perfect medium for me to achieve this.
As a result, I left Ogilvy to open the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, New York as its first employee, which went on to become one of the most significant recent openings in New York. I then moved to Asia where I opened The Warehouse Hotel in Singapore, again as the first employee and Brand, Sales and Marketing Director, working to position it as a cultural epicentre for Southeast Asia. When I moved to London, I talked my way into a project at Kid & Coe because I loved the brand and platform and was a new mother myself. Two years later, I am now MD and feel incredibly lucky to still be so connected to travel but working with families. Kid & Coe is the perfect intersection of everything I love.
Hospitality has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. When you think about the past 18 months, what are you most struck by?
In the short-term, hotels were pretty decimated. But I've never been more appreciative of our customers, and the strength of the hospitality teams out there, to get through these past 18 months together. What struck me the most was that despite being in dire financial straits, I saw former colleagues in Singapore and New York City open up their spaces to serve their communities and provide food for people when everything first shut down. Even though they were quite helpless themselves, they did their best to stay strong and reach out to the communities in which they sit.
Looking ahead, I don't know if travel culture is going to fully return to what it was before. In a recent conversation with a few friends, we agreed that we feel like we’ve lost our old selves; we’re now different people with new and different needs. Looking back at recent hospitality experiences - my wedding in Tuscany, for example, gathering people from different corners of the world - feels so disconnected from our reality now (not to mention privileged). I can’t really imagine myself indulging in something like that again, given the chance.
In such a state of flux, how do you see hospitality evolving to cater to people’s overall wellbeing? What are the trends that you’re interested in at the moment?
I know it’s been nearly two years, but I still can’t get over how fragile our current reality and our world feels. And I think this sense of fragility is affecting our lives, and specifically hospitality, in a few different ways.
One the one hand, ‘wellbeing’ right now translates specifically to a basic sense of safety. People just want reassurance that they will be secluded and safe.
We are also seeing wellbeing expressed as a desire to be in nature. For many months, we saw zero demand for anybody to stay in a hotel, especially in a city (though that has finally come back in the past couple months). On our Kid & Coe Instagram feed for example, people were engaging in content where we show the whole building in situ, surrounded by nature. The minute we’d show a close-up of a property, without that environmental context, it wasn’t getting as much engagement.
Meanwhile short-term rentals, which have historically gotten a bad rap, are fully coming into their own right now: the idea of renting someone else's family home that feels safe and secluded is comforting. With families as our key target at Kid & Coe, we know that they want to rent safe spaces to host an inter-generational get together – and that’s going to be in a home, not a hotel. I also think that newer ‘retreat’ concepts - like Birch - are really well-positioned. They offer activities like pottery, or cooking, or yoga – all ways of getting a meaningful and possibly more personal experience that also avoids crowded tourist spots in a city.
On the flip side, some people are so ready to fully celebrate life. The line of thinking, ‘I’m ready to spend money on big, life-changing experiences while I can.’ We are desperate to reconnect to the people that we love in a way that’s enjoyable and celebratory, and hospitality could be the key platform for that. I personally am prioritising taking a trip to see my friends that maybe we would have planned eight months in advance in ‘normal times’. This time around, we planned it maybe a month ago and I’m on the verge of seeing them!
I’m also interested in the co-working renaissance. Many people turned to self-employment or non-traditional ways of working after losing their jobs during the pandemic, or simply wanting a lifestyle change. And despite things opening back up, people still feel isolated from community structures. As urban hospitality inventory fails to see pre-pandemic guest volumes, hotels are naturally interested in creating ‘third spaces’ that are valuable and viable. Some have gone ahead and created separate sub-brands to cater to it – for example, the Hoxton’s Working from the Hoxton, or Soho House’s Soho Works. I do think that co-working was oversaturated before the pandemic, but I think there’s renewed opportunity given the need for a sense of community, and a comforting, pleasing space where you can interact with people that doesn’t just feel like an office space. I think the driver behind this was a new breed of boutique hotels – led by ACE – that larger legacy chains just can’t replicate. ACE has always felt local and made itself part of the community and culture it found itself in, and similar competitors have followed suit. In this way I see well being expressed through community.
Everything we’ve discussed so far sounds fairly upmarket. Do you think there’s a possibility for more accessible and affordable concepts to pop up, or does wellness inevitably carry a premium?
I was just having this conversation with my team, actually, and I think it’s really a question of how we reframe the value of hospitality and travel now versus before the pandemic.
We always talk about ourselves as a luxury site – as our price point is well above the average nightly rate for an Airbnb – but our customers are still very price-sensitive, especially now. Everyone has been asking for discounts! I do think people are still in survival mode. They're thinking about the financial (and emotional) risk of booking amidst changing regulations and variants, and the potential loss of money. Their attitude is sort of, ‘aren’t you happy that I’m choosing to give you my money?’
That said, the pandemic has made us think more carefully about our consumption: who gets our money, how much we actually need, and the ways in which spending can support those around us. Like many categories, travel has therefore become less of a commodity. We didn’t want to see Kim Kardashian thoughtlessly fly 20 people to a private island in a jet when most of us were isolated at home. So when we speak to the same people who want a discount, and tell them our story of our business surviving during the pandemic, the same customers suddenly say, ‘how can I help you?’
As the world opens up, and as the hospitality trends I’ve mentioned continue, we’re reminded of how when you give a bit more, you actually tend to get a lot more, too. In some ways, these special experiences – that make people feel joyful, relaxed and connected in safe and intimate environments – are priceless.
Where do you think growth in hospitality will come from next?
For maybe the last 20-30 years, the spa has been the epicenter of ‘wellness’ in hospitality. But wellness can no longer simply be confined to a destination - we’re far past the point of, ‘I’m going to the spa for six hours and I’m out.’ Supporting people’s wellbeing IS the hospitality experience.
We’ll continue to see the manifestation of this idea in every hospitality space – whether that’s nature walks, spaces for meditation or contemplation, harnessing local environmental elements (such as natural springs), as well as bringing wellness into the privacy of individual rooms. As people come back to city centres, creating these urban oases may be more important than they’ve ever been.
What's been your biggest wellbeing breakthrough over the last year?
I've had migraines for the past year, which started around almost the same time as we went into lockdown – I’m almost certain they were caused by constant, low-level anxiety. I saw a neurologist, took supplements and consulted Instagram, and yet still suffered from them every single day (I learned the term “chronic daily migraines”).
Finally, in the depths of Lockdown 3 in London, a friend suggested that I try getting outside and moving. Exercise felt like the last thing I had energy for, but I started off gently and kept going until I was running nearly every day. My migraines went away within the first week.
I also started nature bathing (for the record, I hate this term!). As an American living in London, I’d always had a negative perception of parks – in NYC, they’re often quite dirty. But here, in and around London, I’ve been blown away by how many beautiful parks and wooded areas there are. I am now proudly a ‘woods person’: I like feeling a little bit lost and enveloped by trees. It’s where I forget about the pandemic for a precious few minutes.
What does wellbeing mean to you?
Valuing yourself. Putting yourself first. Being clear about what you need to thrive, not just survive.