GUsually the lobby smells first. In Zermatt, a pleasant scent fills the nostrils of the hotel guests of the Cervo Mountain Resort in the valley station of the Sunegga Bahn. Instead of the typical mountain railway smell, a dull, sometimes pungent mixture of oil, brake fluid and rubber, in short: car repair shop, the visitor perceives light wafts of cedar wood, patchouli and musk. Warm, soft, spicy with a pleasant, almost subtle freshness that accompanies the heavy notes of the Orient.
You could call it a coup that the owner of the Cervo Mountain Resort, Daniel Lauber, has succeeded in doing. Not just the creation of his extraordinary fragrance, but above all the strategy of integrating the Zermatt mountain railway into hotel marketing. That not only does his hotel smell like “Beyond Exploring No 6” from the lobby to the spa since the renovation last year, but also the way there. You have to know that Lauber’s hotel, the lodges, are located above the Swiss mountain village, on the edge of the forest. And instead of the steep ascent, the guest prefers to take the lift, which can be reached via the Sunegga cable car. “And, yes,” says Lauber, “skiers have come to the hotel who have followed the scent and only stopped in for a drink.” It doesn’t get any better than that.
Scents stay in the memory for an eternity
Hotels all over the world now use the seductive power of scents. For five- and four-star hotels, but also for smaller boutique hotels, it is now good form to bind guests to the hotel with another medium – scent – in addition to visual attractions and good service. “Visual impressions fade over time, while smells, on the other hand, sometimes stick in the memory for an eternity and are recognized even years later,” says fragrance producer Robert Müller-Grünow. His company “Scentcommunication” has several thousand scents in the archive. Müller-Grünow develops fragrance concepts and the associated technology for supermarket chains, the automotive industry and transport companies. “I can hardly think of an industry that I haven’t worked for. Developing hotel fragrances is usually a particularly nice job.” He has now equipped 100 hotels with olfactory equipment, from large luxury chains such as Park Hyatt and Four Seasons to owner-managed establishments such as the Hotel “Sans Souci” in Vienna with its grassy notes.
Perfumer Sileno Cheloni at work
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Image: PR/Marcela Ferreira
While the American hotel industry has been making use of the findings of perception and emotion psychology since the 1980s, the trend here only really started 15 years ago, parallel to research into human smell by Professor Hanns Hatt, biologist and physician at the Ruhr University in Bochum. For decades he studied the effect of smells on people, animals, living beings and even human sperm. “Scent plays an important role in every decision people make. The olfactory nerve ends in the limbic system, the area of the brain responsible for processing emotions. So whenever we perceive a particular scent, memory brings us back the moment we first experienced it, but also the emotions associated with it, good and bad.”