4 Steps to Elevate Luxury Retail with Hospitality

In the competitive world of luxury retail, exceptional hospitality services can set a brand apart. It’s not just about selling a product, nor just about creating a memorable experience that aligns with the brand’s values. It’s about elevating each customer’s journey into the world of the brand. Adopting a hospitality mindset offers numerous advantages.

For one, it facilitates brand immersion, transforming your brand into a lifestyle rather than just a logo on products. For luxury brands in high demand, hospitality is a new way to touch clients’ lives without diluting the exclusivity of their products.

Outstanding service and hospitality can also turn a disappointing experience – such as the desired product not being available – into a memorable one, with “little” effort. This mindset fosters deeper connections with customers, enabling you to learn more about their preferences and build lasting relationships.

Based on our research, developing a branded luxury service through hospitality typically involves 4 main steps:

1. Instill a hospitality mindset throughout your organization.
2. Train, guide and assist your employees to fully embrace this mindset.
3. Consistently link hospitality back to your customer journey to support other functions and processes (such as, e.g., sales) as hospitality should not be a goal in itself.
4. Find your differentiator within the sector – how can you stand out?

This article will explore in detail how each step can help luxury brands achieve success through hospitality.

Instill a Hospitality Mindset

So, what exactly is a hospitality mindset?

A true hospitality mindset in luxury service goes beyond standard customer service; it’s about creating an atmosphere of respect, attentiveness, and genuine care, where every interaction leaves a lasting impression.

For luxury brands, this mindset requires employees to actively engage in emotional labor—the practice of managing one’s emotions to maintain a positive and welcoming demeanor as part of their role, essential for emotional resilience.

Being perceptive to customers’ emotions and needs is crucial in luxury retail. Employees trained to observe emotional and behavioral cues can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and perceived luxury (Hoffman & Bateson, 2024).

A perceptive employee who regularly “reads the room” can use CRM data, that is often neglected by retail staff. They can better suggest alternatives if a customer seems unsure. They can find more opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell where appropriate. Or they can simply bond over commonalities with their clients to build a more authentic and withstanding relationship.

LVMH’s training programs are a great example of this. Their client-facing teams combine technical knowledge with perceptive interaction techniques, empowering employees to create meaningful, tailored interactions. This builds trust and comfort, fostering stronger emotional connections with their clients.

At Louis Vuitton, client advisors pay attention to introduce their colleagues and share drinks with their customers to demonstrate conviviality. Employees should take the time to learn about their customers’ interests through their CRM.

They should be encouraged to share brand stories, product stories, and more personal stories whilst offering refreshments to create intimate experiences, reinforcing a more genuine sense of community.

A hospitality mindset can be learned and practiced. Although luxury service personnel may initially not see its value, it promotes a supportive work environment. It fosters authentic human connections, builds loyalty, and creates more memorable and emotionally resonant experiences. This mindset enforces respect not only towards customers but also towards each other as team members.

Train Your Team for a Branded Luxury Retail Service

And how can brands best instill a hospitality mindset?

Often, client advisors have well-meaning intentions, but they may still lack the confidence to execute even the most basic gestures. Whether it concerns “what is appropriate eye contact,” “how to welcome a client,” or “how to serve a glass of champagne,” most client advisors have never received any formal training. They may over-rely on occasional feedback from more experienced colleagues to assure them that “what they are doing is OK!”

Developing a branded luxury hospitality service involves comprehensive training beyond mere product knowledge. Continuous professional development underscores the value of luxury hospitality, empowering employees to create not just memorable interactions, but more empathetic and emotionally engaging ones that truly deepen client loyalty.

A holistic approach incorporating hard and soft skills is vital, as luxury customers expect expertise combined with a tailored experience (Dion & Borraz, 2017). Personalizing every detail of the service experience elevates customer satisfaction and builds strong brand loyalty.

Strong examples of integrated and in-depth hospitality training programs specifically designed for retail staff, can be seen at luxury brands, Cartier and Caviar House & Prunier. Whilst Cartier is mainly focused on the luxury watches & jewelry, and Caviar House & Prunier is in luxury F&B, both luxury brands have dedicated resources to encourage their associates to go through curated sessions on luxury service etiquette.

Trainings include role-playing scenarios and workshops, from initiating appropriate eye contact, to mastering the art of welcoming clients with warmth and professionalism. Employees are even trained on how to elevate moments like in 5* hotels, such as serving a glass of high-end champagne, to create an atmosphere of sophistication and exclusivity. These exercises help employees to build confidence and work on their emotional labor, equipping them to better anticipate customer needs, regulate their emotions, and read subtle emotional cues around the room.

Going beyond the implementation of hospitality activities, luxury retail brands should focus on an organizational mindset shift towards hospitality. By training, guiding, and assisting employees beyond basic service protocol in topics such as anticipation techniques and verbal and non-verbal communication, management can empower client-facing teams to deliver a more authentic and high-end customer experience, in confidence.

Link Hospitality Back to the Customer Journey

Can rolling out the red carpet for customers really boost your KPIs?

Integrating hospitality into luxury retail environments is a strategic way to enhance not only customer service activities, but also broader brand functions such as CRM, brand storytelling, and experiential marketing.

By adopting a hospitality-first approach, luxury brands can create environments where the focus is on a more personalized and anticipatory service, mirroring the attention to detail found in five-star hotels.

This mindset transforms the retail space into an experience-driven destination—one where sales are no longer purely transactional but relational, fostering emotional connections that encourage higher spending.

For instance, Louis Vuitton (LV) has woven hospitality into its retail concept through private salons and invitation-only client events. In flagship stores like the LV Maison on Champs-Élysées, VICs (Very Important Clients) are welcomed into private apartments, where personal stylists offer tailored consultations over curated F&B menus.

LV also regularly hosts elaborate events in destinations like Venice, Paris, and St.-Tropez, offering VICs unparalleled access to the brand’s world using travel and lifestyle elements.

This ultra-personalized, hospitality-driven service fosters exclusivity and deepens the individual client relationship, often leading to high-value purchases and stronger brand affinity.

Similarly, at the Gucci Garden in Florence, Gucci offers a multifaceted hospitality experience that includes the Gucci Osteria da Massimo Bottura, a Michelin-starred restaurant. Located in the historic Palazzo della Mercanzia, the Gucci Garden combines fashion, art, and cuisine, immersing visitors in the brand’s universe and encouraging deeper engagement to brand elements. By embracing a true multisensory hospitality experience, sales advisors can build a more exciting, and lasting relationship with customers in an authentic setting true to the brand’s history and heritage.

Ultimately, luxury retailers who embrace hospitality, elevate every stage of the customer journey—before, during, and after purchase. This hospitality-first approach helps to extend customer visits, drive engagement, and ultimately, increase sales performance and long-term customer loyalty, thanks to an enhanced perception of product value.

By offering ultra-personalized services, in experiential spaces, and encouraging emotional engagement, luxury brands drive increased dwell time, higher conversion rates, and repeat visits.

Find Your Differentiator

If everyone serves coffee, how can brands use hospitality to differentiate themselves?

Luxury retail brands can use unique servicescape elements, such as ambiance, spatial design and sensory cues, to enhance customer experience, making hospitality in retail intrinsic to their brand identity. Thoughtfully curated lighting, seating arrangements, and even signature scents can immediately differentiate a brand from its competitors.

To ensure that these efforts yield tangible returns, every investment into a hospitality interaction must be captured in the brand’s CRM system. This allows for creating even more tailored and coherent experiences in the future, ensuring that customers feel seen, valued, and remembered with every interaction. Without data-driven personalization, brands will fall behind in today’s competitive luxury landscape.

Louis Vuitton, for instance, has creatively integrated a branded café and chocolaterie experience at its Paris installation at the Pont Neuf, above their LV Dream exhibition.

Customers can enjoy exclusive chocolates crafted by Cheval Blanc’s head pastry chef, Maxime Frédéric, in a café adorned with custom seating and art installations, creating a multisensory experience that immerses clients into the Louis Vuitton ethos. This approach is part of Louis Vuitton’s broader strategy to blend retail with lifestyle to strengthen brand loyalty.

Similarly, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso 1931 Café leverages its Art Deco-inspired environment to connect with the brand’s heritage, offering guests a journey through history while emphasizing luxury and craftsmanship.

This servicescape enhances the brand’s storytelling and transforms customer interactions into meaningful experiences beyond a traditional welcoming or sales ceremony.

Blending servicescape elements with a well-integrated CRM strategy creates a powerful formula for differentiation through hospitality.

A meticulously designed retail space—featuring bespoke furnishings, curated music, and personalized services—immerses customers in a brand’s world, while a robust CRM ensures these sensory-driven experiences are tailored to individual preferences.

When both elements work in harmony, brands can deliver seamless, emotionally resonant interactions that not only elevate customer satisfaction but also reinforce long-term loyalty, setting them apart in the luxury market.  

A Strategic Investment

In conclusion, developing a branded luxury service through hospitality is not only about enhancing the customer experience into something “memorable”—it’s a strategic investment in the brand’s long-term success.

By adopting a hospitality mindset, training and guiding employees to deliver exceptional service, integrating hospitality into the customer journey to support other functions, and finding unique differentiators, luxury brands can invite their clients into their brand world, transcending traditional in-store experiences and retail services.

However, the key to sustaining these efforts is leveraging customer data effectively. Capturing every hospitality interaction in the brand’s CRM system is essential to refine future experiences, tailor individual offerings, and build lasting client relationships.

In a crowded luxury market, where competition is fiercer than ever, this shift towards a hospitality mindset, using data-driven personalization as a daily practice, becomes the cornerstone for retaining customers and ensuring the brand’s positioning.

Tamara Tovisi – International Master in Luxury Management. Connect with Tamara on LinkedIn.

This article originally appeared on EHL Insights.