The major global hotel groups love to launch new brands. This is primarily a way to lure investors to open new hotels — ”hey, we have this amazing opportunity for you to open the first property of our new lifestyle brand in X city.” As consumers it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference…
Continue reading: Janu: Aman’s New “Energetic” Hotel Brand
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Agree—the new brand doesn’t sound very exciting or as path-breaking as the original Aman.
Wonder what’s the link to the management and Sanskrit. The inspiration behind it all would be interesting to know—especially from the original founders perspective
Ben - The below bloomberg article indicates the price point will be ~$1000 per night vs Aman's ~$1400 nightly average.
“I feel like Aman has given up and is just cashing in at this point. Rather than opening properties in off the beaten track destinations, they are instead focusing on just hitting tourist hotspots”
So they’re going to stop opening resorts (where the hotel *is* the destination) and instead go back to doing what hoteliers have always done: open hotels in places where people anyway want to visit.
Sounds sensible to me. Then again, I hate resorts almost as much as I hate cruise liners...
RNS - I don't think any of Adrian Zecha's other hotel projects (Regent, Chedi...Azerai) has a Sanskrit name. Zecha was also caught in a long legal battle with Vladislav Doronin, whose name you see here... So this name probably isn't the founder's idea.
Janu is probably just chosen to match Aman, the way drag queens dress up veterans or family on RuPaul's Drag Race, and then have to name them in a familial convention with themselves. Alaska created Nebraska and Doronin's Aman created Janu.
Got the email this morning and was in complete awe / disbelief that brands STILL come up with that kind of communication plans. To your point, I just barfed seeing they used every possible (outdated) buzzword. Total turn off as far as I'm concerned!
As much as I would like to try Amans, I immediately lost interest after they opened hotels in Tokyo and New York. Their unique niche in the market was lost.
I'm not sure this is bad news, hopefully it will allow the Russians to channel their evident desire to create expensive nightclub-hotels into a brand other than Aman--Aman Miami, for example, is such a betrayal of the brand. My immediate fear though is selfish, that they'll start giving guest passes to Janu guests to use the Aman Sveti Stefan grounds.
Will it be cheaper? Because those rooms at the Montenegro property do look beautiful. And the issue with expensive but “millennial” brands are that young people tend to not be able to afford them. Just look at Barney’s closing nationawide
Next they’ll be inviting instagram “influencers” to completely wreck whatever remains of the brand at this “Janu”.
This is clearly a money grab. With that said, I’m happy they started another brand as it would be travesty to have these much larger footprint hotels as Aman resorts.
With that said, any amanjunkie can tell you only visit the Amans (Especially the ones in Southeast Asia) that were opened by Zacha as other ones just don’t have the same feel.
While parts of Montenegro are pretty, it's not somewhere I would return. I guess it gets overflow from Croatia tourism but I can't see two Aman properties thriving there at their prices.
So much with you on those boilerplate millennial buzzwords. It always promises the world, but in fact is implemented as some weird and often uncomfortable gimmik ("so unique!"). Some of these traits are admirable, but they would do better to show it then to talk it up to a market burnt out on the idea.
Even though this will probably be a property in an entirely different class as far as luxury, its not a new or particularly interesting idea, coming from a brand which itself was built on a understated but well thought out idea.
I completely agree with you, Lucky. In my opinion, AMAN Resort has lost its true-self after Adrian Zecha's departure. Zecha is like Steve Jobs in ultra luxury hotels with a very unique vision and mission. Doronin only acts as the person who runs the business, not personally attach to the brand and its vision.
Once AMAN Resorts opened its urban resort (AMAN Tokyo and soon-to-open AMAN New York), the brand has lost its core value, like Cliff said. Through Zecha's personal touch and vision, he wanted people to experience what AMAN Resorts all about and the flow was natural, which bring people with money to AMAN. While Doronin's objective is clearly to get the profit from people with money by using the brand.
So, from the business point of view, it needs to grow and brings more revenue (and profit), which I get it. From the brand point of view, AMAN Resorts is no longer AMAN. And now with Janu, it's even more obvious what Doronin is after. There's a difference between the person who believes in and live the brand (he doesn't need to be the salesman yet able to sell the product effortlessly), and the person who only cares about the bottom line (who needs all the effort to sell the product).