Simon Drake Is Redefining Luxury Hospitality, One Experience at a Time
Luxury hospitality is changing fast. Beautiful rooms, polished service and a prestigious address are no longer enough to make a hotel truly memorable. Today’s most sophisticated travellers want personality, energy, emotional connection and a genuine sense of place.
Few hotel leaders understand that shift better than Simon Drake, General Manager of The Store Oxford, who joins Renae Leith-Manos on the Where2FromHere podcast to discuss what modern luxury really looks like — and why the hotels that win in the future will be the ones that make guests feel something.
Drake has built his career across some of London’s most competitive luxury hotels, developing a leadership style centred on one powerful idea: hospitality should feel personal, relevant and alive, not rehearsed.
That philosophy now sits at the heart of The Store Oxford, the striking lifestyle hotel created inside the former Boswell’s department store, an Oxford institution with roots dating back to the 1750s.
Rather than simply preserving a historic building, The Store has reimagined it for a new generation of travellers — blending heritage, contemporary design, food, culture and social energy into a hotel that feels distinctly connected to Oxford.
In this revealing conversation, Drake and Leith-Manos explore the evolution of luxury hospitality, the changing expectations of affluent travellers, the importance of emotionally intelligent service and what it takes to create a hotel people do not simply visit — but remember.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF LUXURY
Oxford has long been associated with tradition, history, and academia. Drake then saw an opportunity to bring something different to the city.
“The ethos behind it was to create something that was far more lifestyle but still to have the levels of service and expectations and team member engagement that you’d expect in a luxury hotel,” he explains.
The result is a property that combines Oxford’s heritage with a younger, more social interpretation of luxury.
For Drake, the building itself is only part of the experience. The real difference comes from the people inside of the building. “It’s incredibly important to us to have personalities working in and out of our building,” he says.
That emphasis on personality extends to how Drake measures the hotel’s success. While occupancy matters, he believes the real test is whether locals choose to spend time there. His goal is to see Oxford residents using The Store for dinner, drinks, coffee and work, becoming part of the hotel rather than passing through it.
LUXURY BEGINS WITH SENSES
Drake’s attention to detail begins before a guest reaches their room.
When assessing a hotel, he considers the entire sensory experience. Through taste, smell, sight, touch and sound.
He has developed his own formula for judging a luxury stay: mattress, shower and breakfast.
“If you tick those three key elements, 90% of people will forgive you as a hotelier for any misdemeanours that may well come up throughout their stay”, he says.
Drake believes that fragrance is key to turning a hotel into a memory.
He created The Store’s signature scent in six months with multiple rounds of testing. Rather than replicating a familiar fragrance, he wanted something distinctive, that would cause people to trigger a memory.
The attention Drake gives to the small details has formed a wider definition of what modern luxury is.
THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE EXPERIENCE
The most distinctive part of Drake’s approach is the way he invests in his team.
At a standalone hotel competing with major international brands, he believes employees need more than a salary to want to stay.
“People don’t just come to work for the paycheck. I want them to come to work because they really want to be here,” he says.
That means creating experiences for staff as well as guests.
Once or twice a year, Drake tells his management team to meet him at an airport without revealing where they are going. They simply disappear for a day before returning home.
He has also flown members of his culinary team overseas so they can experience the cultures behind the food they serve.
When a chef wanted to understand the depth of flavour behind an Italian tortellini dish, Drake didn’t send him a recipe. He flew him to Bologna.
For Drake, experiencing something firsthand creates a level of knowledge and passion that cannot be replicated through research alone.
“If you really experience where that culture comes from,” he says, “you can tell the story and understand the in-depth nature of where it literally came from.”
A New Definition of British Luxury
Drake believes British luxury is changing.
The traditional, formal five-star hotel will always have its place, but today’s traveller increasingly wants something more relaxed, cultural and connected to its surroundings.
For The Store, that means creating a hotel that belongs to Oxford rather than simply sitting within it. However for Drake, the future of luxury hospitality is ultimately about the same thing it has always been about: making people feel something.
Whether it is a signature scent, an unforgettable meal, a conversation with a passionate staff member or an unexpected journey to Bologna, luxury is no longer just what a guest receives. It is what they remember.
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