Les femmes voyages de plus en plus et ont des souhaits et exigences qu'il faut prendre en compte.

Je vous propose un interview très interessant de Siri Løining, la directrice génerale du Grand Hotel à Oslo, qui est à l'initiative de la création du concept "Ladies Floor"




> Siri Løining, can you tell some information about you and about the RICA hotel group?

I am 32 years old from Oslo, been working in hotel industry since I was 16 years old. This is my passion and this is what I love! I have worked for Rica Hotels since 1998. In between I had a couple of years in Zurich working for Hilton Corporation. The position as Hotel Manager at the Grand Hotel I have had since 2003.

Today Rica Hotels is the largest and only hotel chain in Norway that covers the entire country. Rica incorporates nearly 90 hotels in Norway and Sweden. As our guest we give them a wide variety of choices, whether they are hosting seminars, conferences or meetings, or just simply want to spend the night. Whether our guests prefer fjords, mountains, urban life or rural life, North, South, East or West - you'll always find a Rica Hotel nearby.




>You manage a great hotel, the Grand Hotel, can you tell us some fact about it and the profil of people who stay in ?

The Grand Hotel first opened its doors in 1874. The Louis XVI revival style building, with its hint of Nordic art nouveau and characteristic clock tower from 1913, is right on Karl Johans gate, Oslo's main street, and stands as a symbol of a first-class hotel with tradition, atmosphere and style. The hotel has been extended and modernized over the years, and today, the Grand Hotel has 290 rooms, including 51 suites, 15 conference rooms, and a number of restaurants and bars. It is a modern meeting place for people from around the world in the center of Norway's capital. It's right where you want to be!

Among our regular guests, you will find heads of state, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and other well-known figures in the fields of business and entertainment. We also have lots of regular guests who has been with us for years. We have a good mix of young and older guests.




> Women spend more time on Internet, have more and more financial power and special request for their professional trip and vacation.

For exemple we see hotel for women only http://www.frauenhotel-berlin.de/ or hotel with special arrangement for women http://www.ladysfirst.ch/

You give a great answers for this needs with « Ladies Floor », can you tell us more about this story and concept ?

We have many female guests whether they are staying for leisure or business. I wanted to do something special for them because we did an extensive research and found out that women spend more time in a hotel room than a man. They are often the ones who chooses the hotel when out travelling and are very interested in design. However, I must admit that men are as good with design as women, it is only that women spend more time looking for the details.

I also wanted to show the hotel world that we do not only have to have standardized hotel rooms, but to make each room an own experience. They should have their own story, be different and each guest would find their own favourite. Therefore I used so many different designers.




I think Norway has many strong women within different areas that others get inspired by or look up to. We have culture that we should promote stronger and we should "shout it out loud" and be proud of the ones who has succeded and shows a healthy image of a today's woman! At the same time we always talk about the past, I wanted to look in the future and therefore 13 young women where asked and selected to represent their own room. These women also travel a lot and knows what are missing in a hotel room, what they would like and maybe what women would be interested in getting.

There are many reasons for why I choose to open up a whole floor, but maybe my strongest wish was to create all wishes from different women into 1 floor! Whether I have managed to get it all, is questionable, but at least I have managed to create " a room of one's own"!

The feedback as been amazing and the floor is already very popular. The men loves it as well! And many has bought surprises for their girlfriends, wife's, friends etc to have a Ladies Floor night! Men are not excluded as long as it is in accompany with a woman :)

Many has asked me when I will do a Men's Floor, but that will only be overkill and I think a good idea should not be done twice! However, I want to develop on Ladies Floor and many guests have given me great ideas. After I created our website www.ladiesfloor.no the response from other countries has been great and I think there are several hotels who is considering this concept.

>What do think about ladies taste for:

>Travel: I think we travel more now than ever and we know more what we want to see or where we want to stay. The hotels gets challenged more by the guests then before. That is good!

>Hotel : We should not be so mainstream! For a long time we wanted only minimalistic hotels, I think it is more about the service you get, atmosphere in hotels, the standard of the room. Does it give you the comfort that you desire to stay in your room throughout your whole stay? This is what we should ask ourselves. My favourite hotels are not the most modern ones, but the ones with soul and spirit. The hotels that provides me with the little extra!

>Business: More and more women are up and coming in business, and just yesterday there was a huge poll on "who is your favourite employer"? The two top places was given by the public to women. 1) Inger Ellen Nicolaisen (founder of NIKITA and a well-known entrepreneur.




>Internet is going faster and we talk now about Web 2.0, what do you
think about this evolution in the tourism market place ?

Great, as long as it does not replace the human touch!

>We see important impact of news technologies (RSS, AJAX, podcast, blog, socialnetworking tools, etc), what is your point of view ?

Blogging has just started in Norway so I am not so familiar with this as the younger generation is, but a great way of communicating and getting the "word and opinions across"! Media takes over, so why shouldn't we create our own story or get the word out. In the end of the day, everybody is curios of each other. At least we should be!

>Blogs are also a new media and a new part of Internet, we talk about "blogosphère".

We see big hotel group who start to be in Web 2.0, for exemple Sheraton with a new and interactive web site.

What about you or RICA hotel group and the blogs trend ?

Like I said, it is still not a huge trend in our country. Just this summer a big newspaper called VG posted it on their website and gave the public the chance to report on what they do during summertime. It was a huge hit.

I have not seen what Sheraton is doing, but if they are the first in our business it will be great to learn how they will do it and how popular it will become. We will continue to make our web site a good tool for our guest. At the moment our own website www.grand.no will be changed shortly to make it more interactive.




>You have the micro :

Thank you for showing interest in Ladies Floor. Should there be any visitors from France wanting to stay at the Grand, please do not hesitate to contact us. We would love to have you as our guests! We actually need more French visitors in Oslo - they are great guests to have and very interested in design and hotels, so Ladies Floor should be a good place to visit.




Merci Siri, it was a pleasure to do this interview ;-)