Is This The World's Most Exclusive Hotel Brand? (2024)

When Kim Jones, the men's artistic director at Louis Vuitton, arrived at the new Aman Tokyo, after the Paris fashion shows last January, it was 4 a.m. He was jetlagged and famished. This being an Aman—one of 30 resorts that comprise arguably the world's most exclusive hotel chain—the kitchen was still serving a full menu, as it does 24 hours a day. Nothing sounded quite right to Jones, so the staff offered to run out to the fish market to ensure the freshest sushi and sashimi. An hour later, Jones, who has stayed at 17 different Amans, was feasting on a memorable piece of tuna. "Nothing is too much to ask for at Aman," he says, on the phone from Paris.

The staff at Aman will do anything that is legal and does not violate the privacy of another guest. Although Aman legend has it that a former employee at Amangiri in Utah was willing to risk being arrested for speeding in order to get a guest to the airport in Las Vegas in time for his flight. The guest promised to post bail, which turned out to be unnecessary.

Want a white Christmas in the middle of the desert? A guest staying at Amanjena in Marrakesh asked for snow so the hotel sent dozens of trucks to the Atlas Mountains on Christmas Eve. When the guests woke up in the morning, they had a light dusting outside their room.

A few years ago, a couple staying at Amanyara in the Turks and Caicos was practicing a daily routine of silent walking mediation and asked the staff to ignore them at all times; they obliged. When an American couple stayed at Amankila in Bali to celebrate their 30th anniversary and the husband realized he forgot to bring the 1968 burgundy (the same bottle they'd had on their wedding night), the hotel chartered a plane to bring the wine from the U.S. It arrived in time for their anniversary celebration.

Aman's service can be best described as a total commitment to saying "yes" to a class of people unaccustomed to hearing "no."

It's these kind of stories that Aman "junkies"—repeat guests that constitute an estimated 50 percent of the brand's business—love to tell. The hotels do not advertise, have no loyalty program and rarely lower their rates, which average $1,400 per night for a basic room (villas can climb to $50,000 per night). Most of the properties have fewer than 40 spacious rooms, which book at a company-wide occupancy rate of just 40 percent, low for the industry.

But the privately owned London-based company has still managed to attract a devoted, even religious, following among business leaders and celebrities such as Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks, and Russian billionaire Andrey Melnichenko, who last spring docked his $300 million Philippe Starck-designed yacht at Amanyara.

Why are these high-net-worth individuals willing to pay twice the price of other luxury hotels to stay repeatedly with Aman? First, privacy: Aman takes it so seriously that staff members are prohibited from discussing if a famous person is on the property. Second, the brand's minimalist design and high-quality architecture—the opposite of most big-box hotels. Finally, service: Aman's can be best described as a total commitment to saying "yes" to a class of people unaccustomed to hearing "no."

The party line on Aman is that's all about the service, which is probably best described by what the Japanese call 'omotenashi,' loosely translated to mean the sublime mastery of anticipating a guest's needs. It's no coincidence that the Japanese comprise one of Aman's biggest customer bases—and that the brand recently opened its first urban outpost, Aman Tokyo, there.

Being one step ahead of guests is a cultivated art and science at Aman. If you are a junkie, there's a file on you, shared between properties, usually in the same country, including information on when you prefer to have lunch, the type of pillows you requested during your last stay, how you take your coffee, and even your relationship status.

The company—Aman means "peaceful" in Sanskrit—was founded by accident in 1988 by the Indonesian hotelier Adrian Zecha, who was looking for a vacation home in phu*ket and found a property that made more sense as a shared plot with multiple homes. So Zecha, now in his eighties, corralled his friends from all across the world to invest in villas and that became Amanpuri, the first Aman.

That original spark for the brand—of inviting one's friends some place special—still infuses the Aman edict. "I tell the general managers, they have to behave like they are welcoming their best friends to their home, so they have to bring them to the local cinema and show them the best spots for sunsets," said C.E.O Olivier Jolivet.

At Aman, no detail is too small, even for Jolivet. Following in Zecha's footsteps when the founder retired, Jolivet visits a different Aman practically every week to personally inspect everything from the rooms to the spa to the food.

On a trip last year to Amanzoe in Greece, Jolivet was giving detailed feedback about the menu. "I told the chef and general manager to remove the Asian flavors from the menu. It was too complicated and doesn't reflect the simplicity of Amanzoe," Jolivet said in a phone interview from Singapore. Incidentally, the food is considered one of Aman's weaker points. "It's not a culinary experience; they don't hook you through your stomach; it's more of a sensory experience," said Eduardo Gaz, who has visited over a dozen Amans and is the C.E.O. of Selections, a luxury travel agency in Sao Paulo.

For a hotel with its price point, Amans remain surprisingly informal. The global elite want relaxed elegance, as it turns out. So the company encourages employees, whose salaries are typically higher than elsewhere in the industry, to showcase their personalities, whether that means mentioning that they love boating or that they hail from Tamil Nadu.

"Casualness allows the staff to be closer to the customer," Marco Franck, General Manager of Amanyara and regional director of the Americas, said at an interview at the hotel. And the closeness fosters friendships, both real and faux, between staff and guests. Robert Fung, a retired classical ballet dancer who, at the time I interviewed him, had visited all the Aman properties except the four in North America, says he has many good friends who work at Amans all around the world and keeps up with them on Facebook.

However, the socializing can be intense, both for the people staying there and the hotel staff. Christophe Olivro, the former general manager of Amangiri (he's now at Amanpulo in the Philippines), says he spends three to four hours a day talking to guests. (One wonders if Aman enthusiasts ever get tired of the "casualness" which can sometimes mean a three-hour car ride of non-stop conversation initiated by the driver.)

In keeping with this ethos, the hiring at Aman is based on attitude, not aptitude. Employees are not plucked straight from the Ecole Hotelerie de Lausanne, the Harvard of hospitality schools. So you may not always be served from the left. There is also no formal training, no standard operating procedures, giving the staff a great deal of latitude on everything from accepting an invitation from guests to join them for lunch (as once happened at Amanyara) to the freedom to do something special like upgrade a guest to a villa or charter a private boat without having to go through layers of corporate bureaucracy.

Like many hotel brands, Aman has a development team scouring the earth for incredible sites, which they seem to get to first. Aman opened Amankora in Bhutan a decade ago, before many of the other big hotels; Amanwana is still the only resort located on remote Moyo Island, off Bali, Indonesia. Amangiri, nestled in the Utah desert, is built on former federal land and carved onto and around rock formations. The newest North American property, Amanera, recently opened on north coast of the Dominican Republic and sits on a mile-wide beach with a backdrop of low mountain forests. Not surprisingly, there are few other hotels nearby.

Still, while the U.S. is Aman's biggest market, junkies say Asia is the brand's heart and soul, the place where Aman is able to do what it does best: make guests feel connected to local cultures. Aman provides the very wealthy a way to interact—at the right distance and with the right handling—with exotic and foreign places but within the cocoon of a five-star hotel.

For many, but particularly for the new generation of junkies, authenticity is the new luxury. These are a class of travelers who want to chant with the local monks in Cambodia, or be woken at 4 a.m. to do sunrise yoga on the steps of an ancient temple in India (both experiences Aman offers). "When I first went to Bali, my hotel had these Balinese dancers who looked like they were inauthentic, but when Aman does it, they do it with the local dance school," said Jackson Tang, director at an economic consulting firm, who has visited the three Amans in the Bali area numerous times. "Aman has ruined all other hotels for me," Tang said in a phone interview from Florence, Italy, one of his three residences.

Meanwhile, the company was engaged in a fierce legal battle between its minority share owner, Omar Amanat, and majority shareholder, Vladislav Doronin, a Russian real-estate investor who used to travel to many of the Aman properties with his former girlfriend, Naomi Campbell. But even the lawsuit, which has been settled with full ownership going to Doronin, did not keep the brand from expanding. "We managed to open Aman Tokyo because of contributions from the majority shareholder [Vladislav Doronin]," Jolivet said.

And, at least so far, the urban experiment at Aman Tokyo seems to be working. Occupancy rates are currently around 80 percent and at twice the cost of its competitors. The hotel has 100-foot ceilings in the lobby (unheard of in an industry usually more focused of getting the most number of rooms in per square foot) and a vast indoor pool surrounded by glass windows. Fung stayed there for a few nights earlier this year before checking into the Mandarin Oriental. "I felt like I was moving from a deluxe hotel to a YMCA," he said.