The Savoy

The Savoy sits at the top of British luxury hospitality. Heritage, reputation, expectation — all of it earned. But competition in the luxury sector was sharpening, and the leadership team knew that resting on legacy is how legacies end.

They needed a vision robust enough to set direction for the next three to five years, distinctive enough to feel uniquely Savoy, and credible enough to align a newly formed leadership team behind it. Then the pandemic hit. The launch had to wait. And the work suddenly had to do something we hadn’t planned for: hold the leadership team together through closure and shape a successful reopening.

We started with the room. Strategy, goals, luxury market trends, guest expectations, colleague perceptions — the full picture of where the Savoy sat and where it could go. We brought the new leadership team together for an experiential workshop that surfaced four distinctive vision territories, each offering a different future. From there, we worked with the team to choose, sharpen and own one.

The result: “Placing extraordinary people at the heart of memories made and stories told” — a vision that holds heritage and innovation in the same sentence, and applies as much to colleagues as it does to guests. We then built the 24-month strategic roadmap connecting vision, goals and existing programmes — the first time the leadership team had seen all three on one page. When Covid forced reopening, we facilitated the digital exec session that used the vision as the platform to re-enter a changed world.