Business history explainer videofrom @the.ryanexperience

Transcript

This man built a luxury hotel empire and changed hospitality forever. In the nineteenth century, hospitality followed a simple playbook. Build hotels in large population better, cities like New York, Paris, and London. William Van Horn, chairman of the Canadian Pacific Railway, broke that rule completely. At the time, the Canadian Pacific Railway had hundreds of kilometers of track running through uninhabited land. Van Horn realized that his most precious asset wasn't the railway, it was the uninhabited wilderness. His famous line was, if we can't export the scenery, let's import the tourists. There was no precedent for convincing wealthy Americans and Europeans to travel into the cold, the wilderness for pleasure. So he decided to build fortresses in the mountains, a place where wealthy guests could stare at these savage mountains through the comfort of the fortress. These buildings were designed to dominate their environment, not to fit in with it. Chateau style architecture, local stone, turrets, it felt permanent. Van Horne was one of the original pioneers of world building. To complete the castle in the mountain world, he brought in Swiss mountain guides. They wore traditional mountaineering clothing and taught the guests how to explore mountain trails safely. He even built the guides a Swiss style village they could live in. Ultimately, what Van Horne proved is that you can create demand through luxury world building. He proved that hospitality can be a demand creation machine, not just a demand servicing one. His playbook became the blueprint for modern hospitality. He showed that if you can create a world, a controllable sanctuary inside of a chaotic environment, that people will come. He didn't invent destination hotels necessarily, but he did industrialize destination hospitality. In part two tomorrow, I'm gonna talk about the downfall of Fairmont Hotels and what went wrong.