September 25th, 2019

I am writing from the lobby of the newly-renovated TWA hotel at JFK airport. In what already feels like the most cliché-ridden note yet, let me start by saying this: they really don’t build ‘em like this anymore. 

The costs of this renovation are well documented. No detail was missed. The elevator from the terminal has two stops: “Present Day JetBlue” and “1960s TWA Hotel”.  Fly Me To The Moon plays in the background. The bellmen are dressed like ground crew, the staff like pilots and flight attendants.

There is a bar in an old 40’s Constellation aircraft outside. The immaculately restored oval flight board that once showed arrivals from West Berlin and departures to far Bombay now clicks away every few minutes with changing welcomes, the ultimate instagrammable moment in the social media age. This place is nothing if not on brand.

They’ve got a restaurant from Jean-Georges, four bars, three event facilities, two coffee shops (one from Intelligensia, obv), a rooftop pool, a bookstore, a gift shop, a gym, a TWA museum, and a Shinola outpost.

They’ve even got a “food hall”.

Over the course of the afternoon, more and more guests have arrived. The sunken lounge is starting to fill. Everyone is taking pictures, many with real cameras.  Drinks are flowing. There are business meetings. People are shopping. This entire experience raises a hundred questions, but two stand out. The first:

Who was this built for? Aviation geeks? Architectural buffs? Business travelers? They even rent rooms in four-hour blocks. . .  and that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

At Revel we start every project we work on –either as a principal or consultant – with the same critical question. A question that needs to be thoroughly understood, and too often isn’t:

Who is the patron?

There are a hundred knock-on questions that flow from this: Why are they coming? How do they get here? How often will they come? What are we offering that no one else is? How much time do we think they’ll spend here? But that first question remains: who is the patron?

The second question is a bit more existential: What, exactly, is this place? Is it a museum? Business hotel? Luxury resort? F+B destination? Overnight rooms are $199, four-hour “day stays” are $119. Cocktails start at $16. I didn’t get a price on the design-porn coffee table books or the leather attaches.

The project has had plenty of haters, skeptics, mixed reviews, and puzzled looks. It also gets a lot of buzz, a ton of press, lots of events and a seemingly steady crowd. If this were located in Manhattan there would be a line around the block.

Patrons come, they linger, they drink, they eat, they shop, they instagram (we did), they leave (or not). It wasn’t the greatest experience of all time. The Rat Pack Muzak was a bit much after a while. The staff was kind-of-helpful. The drinks were good, the snacks were not. We’re kicking ourselves for not buying that Eero Saarinin book.

But it was an experience. This place isn’t a hotel: it’s a lifestyle center masquerading as a resort. They’re running their retail like hospitality. You can learn a lot about how to create and operate an experience-driven project by spending a day here.

Where we’ve been: We’ve just returned from the fall ULI conference. The mood was upbeat but uncertain. We saw presentations on a lot of great development projects of every size and stripe, ones that even ten years ago would have been hard to imagine.

Investors have billions of dollars to deploy, but aren’t sure where to place their bets: we heard from several that their appetite for new retail was “zero.” No one we spoke to thought that real estate fundamentals were off, but that there were simply too many other variables — from Amazon to tariffs — to be certain about much. As one speaker put it: “Whatever happens, this time its not CRE’s fault.”

Drop us a line and let us know what’s keeping you busy, and if we can help you discover who your patrons really are (and what it is they really want).

 Cheers,

 G