The last breakfast of AEDIP FOCUS COVID 19 has been focused on the impact of the coronavirus disease pandemic in the hotel sector.
María de Juan, our founding partner, talks about how hotels emerged as a need to be safe. The challenge now in the face of this pandemic is not to achieve physical security but health security. And achieve it by making the user feel a great experience.
“As architects, as designers, our obligation and also what we enjoy the most is to anticipate new ways of behaving for people. The question I have asked myself is not so much how are the hotels going to be?, but how are we going live in the hotels? and how we architects and designers will respond to our new behaviors.”
Reorganizing common areas, reinventing the use of certain spaces, bactericidal materials and technology, which does not require much investment and can be of great help.
“This situation will allow us to recover a piece of land that we had largely ceded to the decorators. I think that both interior designers and architects in the coming months have a unique opportunity to regain the importance of the walls, surfaces and spaces.”
“Our task is to fit the disinfecting mats, the gel dispensers well and allow there to be spaces where we gradually make an entrance in the hotel, so that once we have gone through all that virtual tunnel, we feel safer even more than in our own home.”
“Designers have to dream, we have to think beyond. We not only have to think about how we are going to get out of it, but we are going to think about the future. Almost everyone says that this may happen again, hopefully in a long time. Technology can help us make our confinement an opportunity to see new things and to enjoy.”
“In the short term, operators should not have to make large investments, they will not be able to. These are small measures that we can implement and that will make the hotel experience very, very pleasant.”
The Marriot Hotel in Madrid, a joint project at this time of Arvo architecture of Juan and Millenium, gave way to Javier Illán, president of Grupo Millenium. Always with a vision more focused on quality than volume. “ In Spain it is something that we must take precedence. These circumstances such as those we are experiencing where everything massive seems to be less common than the most exclusive, I think it should be the trend we are taking in the Spanish hotel sector.”
“We have been in these circumstances for two months. I don’t think we should go back to life before this crisis. This has to help us understand that there were certain things that were being done wrong. I believe that this trend that we have all forgotten right now that came from sustainability, to take better care of our planet, is a very clear accelerator that has happened to us to continue with that trend. Try to make things better.”
“In the short term, business plans are more affected than they would be without this circumstance. As we return to reality, and it will not be as long as we thought two months ago, the Spanish hotel market has impressive strengths. Spain has evolved a lot in the chain categories. Right now, a quality customer attraction has been generated in Spain and we are attracting a type of customer who has good mobility within the country, who is a visitor to several cities that we have, perfectly connected and with absolutely surprising infrastructures.”