When we last sat down with Tamara Lohan at ILTM Cannes in December, she was roughly six hours into her new role as Global Brand Leader for Luxury at Hyatt. Six months later, one of the brands at the center of her attention feels almost tailor-made for her: The Unbound Collection by Hyatt.
Launched in 2016 with just three properties, the collection now counts 53, with room count up 9.2 percent over the past year alone. For a brand built around hotels with fiercely individual identities, growth raises the obvious question: How do you add scale without making the collection feel, well, more collected than distinctive?
Lohan, who co-founded Mr & Mrs Smith in 2003 and served as CEO before Hyatt acquired the company in 2023 for $66 million, has spent much of her career championing hotels precisely because they do not look or feel like everyone else’s.
“The more I discover about the Unbound Collection, the more I love it,” she tells Luxury Travel Advisor. “It doesn’t make sense for Hyatt to be the brand on these hotels. The hotel is the brand.”
Hotels With Their Own Stories to Tell
In Cannes, the iconic Hôtel Martinez, recently anointed one of France’s better-than-five-stars palace distinctions, is about to have a new moment of fame. The Riviera landmark will be one of the featured hotels in Season 4 of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” alongside Airelles Château de la Messardière in Saint-Tropez and Mandarin Oriental Lutetia, Paris. With these backdrops, all we can say is ooh la la.
After three seasons at Four Seasons properties, the White Lotus effect is well documented: Virtuoso reported a 424 percent surge in bookings to Sicily after Season 2. Now it is Hyatt’s turn. Opened in 1929 by hotelier Emmanuel Martinez and long associated with French Riviera glamour, the Martinez has plenty of personality to hold its own.
“If it didn’t invent beach clubs, I don’t know what did,” Lohan told LTA shortly before the White Lotus news was announced. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal days later, she said: “When something like that comes knocking, it’s an opportunity to put the hotel onto a slightly different stage.”
That storytelling instinct runs through the collection, and it shows up in details rather than amenities. At Great Scotland Yard in London, guests check in inside the former Metropolitan Police headquarters, where the building’s past as a crime-fighting nerve center is woven into everything from the bar menu to the artwork. The Georgian in Santa Monica is an 84-room Art Deco landmark where Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable once stayed, its ocean-facing terrace still drawing the same golden-hour crowd it did decades ago. Hotel 1000 brings Unbound to Seattle’s waterfront with Puget Sound views and a MICHELIN One Key distinction, a 120-room counterpoint to the brand’s more period-set properties.
Earlier this month, Hôtel Palais de la Méditerranée opened in Nice following an approximately €50 million ($57 million) renovation. The Art Deco facade, designed by father-and-son architects Charles and Marcel Dalmas and classified as a historic monument, has been lovingly preserved, while designer Linda Boronkay, formerly Design Director at Soho House, has reinterpreted the interiors across 173 rooms and 28 suites. A rooftop terrace overlooks the Baie des Anges, and ZOUZOU Restaurant channels the golden age of the Riviera.
“Every time a hotel joins, I learn something new about the people behind it, why it was created, the history. The storytelling never stops,” Lohan says.
It is a story she wants told louder. Lohan says some of Hyatt’s luxury properties were not getting the attention they deserved, which is part of why she recently hired a dedicated social media manager for the luxury division.
“We have outstanding properties,” she says. “I don’t want to be quiet about it.”
Don’t expect that same volume on Hyatt's by-invite-only Privé travel advisor program just yet, though. Changes are in progress, and Lohan is not ready to share details.
“Things are happening,” she says. “Watch this space.”
New Stays to Watch
The next wave of Unbound openings is less about polished sentences and more about places clients have not been able to get to yet. Cayo Levantado Resort arrives this summer as a private-island, all-inclusive escape off the Dominican Republic’s Samaná Peninsula, reachable only by boat. Its 218 suites and white-sand beaches come with personal ambassadors and a wellness program built around Taíno healing traditions, the kind of detail that gives an all-inclusive a sense of place rather than a sense of formula.
In Niagara-on-the-Lake, The Clayfield opens in August as a 102-room retreat set between vineyard rows and the historic Old Town, with a partnership with nearby Stratus Vineyards bringing the region’s wine-country pedigree directly into the stay. Also opening in August, The Barai Hua Hin takes the collection to Thailand for the first time, a 98-room beachfront resort, including 27 suites, built around a wellness program rather than added onto one.
“They want what we can offer,” Lohan says of the properties joining the collection. “And we have a strong reputation for looking after these hotel brands.”
Ditch the Script
Ask Lohan about the single most important touchpoint in a luxury stay and she won’t give a neat answer.
“It depends entirely on the mode you’re traveling in,” she says.
What underpins every scenario, she says, is the feeling of being genuinely cared for, and that cannot be scripted.
She tells the story of a guest arriving distracted, frantically checking their phone. The instinct is to take the luggage and unburden them. But what if the charger is in that bag and they are about to lose an important call?
“How does a colleague read those cues and say, do you need something from your bag first?” she asks.
The answer, she says, is not a new training protocol. It is a great GM.
“Someone who walks the floor, leads by example, creates a culture of care,” she says. “If you genuinely care for the guest, you read the room.”
On AI, Lohan says Hyatt is trialing tools that pull guest data from multiple systems into something actionable.
“Before, you’d have a long list of data points,” she says. “AI can ask, what is actually important for this guest, for this stay? That’s where the unlock is.”
But humanity, she adds, is still the core of hospitality.
“The cues, the tone of voice, the body language,” she says. “A great hotelier reads those signals in the moment. AI cannot do that.”
From three properties at launch to 53 a decade later, Unbound keeps adding hotels with stories worth telling. Lohan has no intention of keeping quiet about them.
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