Sir Richard Branson Founder, the Virgin Group Trains, planes and now a trendy hotel business: as the
Virgin Group's latest venture in the travel sector comes to fruition, Andy Hoskins speaks to Sir Richard Branson
A COUPLE OF HOURS after bringing the road outside the Virgin Hotel Chicago to a close following his latest publicity stunt, I sit down with Sir Richard Branson in the rooftop bar of his newly-opened hotel. He still sports the garish cardigan and bright white shoes donned in order to recreate an iconic scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a film that sees the title character get up to all sorts of mischief in Chicago. Branson’s pastiche ends with him dancing awkwardly
to the Beatles’ Twist & Shout atop the hotel’s electric- powered Tesla supercar in front of a large crowd. “I hadn’t actually seen the film until yesterday and suddenly I’m told I've got to dance and sing and whatever, and initially your brain says ‘I’m 65 years old and I wasn’t that good at it when I was 18 years old’. “It could be very embarrassing but you just have to
throw yourself into anything you do in life. If people are going to work really hard to try and create something like this hotel, the least I can do is make sure people know about it,” he says. The event certainly had the desired effect and two parking tickets for the carnival float he arrived on seem like a small price to pay for the exposure. Having dabbled in all manner of business lines, a
move into branded hotels seems long overdue. “I suspect we should have launched 30 years ago when we launched Virgin Atlantic,” he says. “We have business people flying all over on Virgin and they love the experience and then we dump them in hotels that are not very Virgin-esque.”
I see life as one long learning process. I love creating things; I love enabling people around me to fulfil their dreams of creating things
There’s no mistaking this one is a Virgin creation,
however, with its trendy staff, measured use of red, tributes to British culture and quirky features. I ask how involved he was in the design of the hotel. “I’d love to take full credit for this place but our input
was relatively small. First of all, it was finding Raul [Leal, Virgin Hotels CEO]. He’s someone we’ve known
32 THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE
personally for some time and getting the right person at the top is critical. Someone who is a motivator, gets the right team and has great taste.” He adds, “We gave them some basics, but Raul and
the team have really created what we’re sitting in.” Chicago might seem an unusual location for the first
property, but the price was right for this “beautiful iconic 1930s building that we could convert.” Hotels in New York and Nashville are next, while San Francisco and New Orleans are rumoured to be confirmed in due course. A raft of US cities are on the wish-list, and then there is the question of London. “We did start looking at the same time but with the
hotel business there is always a danger of paying too much and in the UK the prices were just very frothy – but there will be a Virgin Hotel in London eventually.” He says that getting the first one right is key, and
after that it is “relatively easy because you know you’ve got a formula and then you can experiment.” Branson estimates he is on the road for as much as
six months a year and spends 80 per cent of his time on the group’s not-for-profit ventures. This morning he participated in an event for young entrepreneurs and his next destination is a Virgin Unite conference on the theme of ‘audacious ideas’. So with his wealth estimated at £4.1billion and seemingly no thoughts of retirement on the horizon, what keeps him motivated? “I just see life as one long learning process. I love
creating things; I love enabling people around me to fulfil their dreams of creating things. And we all get a kick when we’re praised – we all flourish under that. “I think the Virgin brand is known globally and known
for its fun and irreverence and doing things slightly differently to other brands,” he says. “Because the brand is that well known it means that
we can decide to go into the cruise ship business and people will give us a try. We don’t have to spend millions on advertising because the brand is already well respected – there has been some sort of purpose in these rather off-the-wall promotions we’ve done over the years,” he laughs. “I’ve done a lot of mad, fun things to put Virgin on
the map over the years. I've sometimes nearly killed myself in the process but it’s been a lot of fun.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96