Luxury Retail’s Hospitality Problem Isn’t a Training Problem

A new paper from EHL Hospitality Business School and an incoming INSEAD PhD candidate makes a confident argument: luxury retail should adopt the hospitality mindset, and the data now proves it pays. The best concierge and the best sales associate, the authors write, are doing exactly the same job. They are not selling a room or a timepiece, they are orchestrating an experience.  But it describes a luxury retail experience that, for most people walking into most boutiques, does not exist.

The paper rests on field research conducted at just two boutiques in Singapore, a city whose service culture is a genuine global outlier and whose very important customer (VIC) density per square mile makes it one of the easiest places on earth to argue that hospitality scales. 

Walk the equivalent route in Dubai Mall, and the thesis collapses inside a single sun-drenched afternoon. At Rolex, a sales associate