A Different Way of Seeing Hospitality

Elke Bretz · Founder of azulomo · Creator of Slow Living Hospitality™

I’m Elke Bretz, founder of azulomo and creator of Slow Living Hospitality™, a more considered approach to creating stays that people value, remember and choose.

My route into hospitality hasn’t been a conventional one. For more than two decades, my work has centred on experience design, optimisation and understanding human behaviour. I founded and built a design agency, worked across hundreds of digital projects and spent years exploring what shapes people’s decisions, what creates trust and where friction gets in the way.

That work taught me to look beyond how something appears and consider how it is experienced. To listen carefully, question assumptions and test whether a change makes a meaningful difference, both to the person experiencing it and to the business behind it.

Alongside that, I’ve always been drawn to the creative side of experience. How a space feels. What gives a brand its character. How light, materials, scent, sound, imagery and language shape what we notice, feel and remember.

Hospitality brought those worlds together for me.

People and behaviour. Creativity and place. Experience and business.

What travel and place taught me

I have always loved discovering places: tiny guesthouses, family-run restaurants, beautiful hotels and those unexpected places you find yourself talking about years later. The ones I remembered most weren’t necessarily the ones that offered the most. They were the ones that made me feel something.

Through travel and some of the bigger changes in my own life, I began to understand why. Sometimes we travel for discovery. Sometimes we need rest, perspective, connection or simply the space to feel like ourselves again.

I became fascinated by how a place can make room for those feelings, and how the choices we make within it can help. That curiosity drew me further into interiors. I’ve designed and restyled homes influenced by country living, Balinese design and Mediterranean spaces, and studied with Natalie Walton, whose work has long inspired me. Her approach to home reflects so much of what I’m drawn to: simplicity, natural materials and spaces with a quiet spirit of their own.

The countryside barn my husband, Craig, and I restyled, later featured on BBC’s Escape to the Country, brought those ideas into practice and reinforced something my work had taught me: how an experience feels is shaped by many connected decisions. In hospitality, those decisions reach beyond the interior. They live in the welcome, the rhythm of a day, the connection to the surrounding place and the small details that help someone feel understood. Together, they shape the feeling of being there, and what someone takes away with them..

Why I created azulomo

I began to wonder what hospitality might become if we gave the feeling of a stay the same consideration as its amenities, occupancy and technology. That question became Slow Living Hospitality™, grounded in a belief that connects my work with my own experience of places: creating greater commercial value begins with understanding human value more deeply.

For me, it starts with what someone hopes their time away will give them. Rest. Connection. Discovery. Space to feel like themselves again. Then, how the identity of a stay and the decisions within it can make that possible.

Experience design has taught me to notice the connections: what draws someone in, what gives them confidence to book, whether arrival fulfils the promise and what they remember afterwards.

Because how guests feel isn’t separate from how hospitality businesses perform.

Emotion influences desire.
Relevance influences choice.
Trust influences conversion.
Distinctiveness influences perceived value.
Memory influences recommendation and return.

Through azulomo, I turn that thinking into practical frameworks, helping hosts understand their guests, define their Stay Identity and make thoughtful decisions that strengthen both the experience and the business.

Through Slow Living Hospitality™, my Founder Essays, SLOW / the azulomo journal, ongoing research and The Slow Living Hosting Masterclass™, I want to contribute a more thoughtful way of looking at independent hospitality. One that takes emotion seriously, understands the value of identity and place, and never forgets the human being on the other side of the booking.

And I keep returning to the same thought: The places we remember aren’t always the places that gave us the most. They are often the places that understood what mattered.

And I believe that could change the way we think about hospitality.

Elke Bretz
Founder, azulomo
Creator of Slow Living Hospitality™

/ FROM THE FOUNDER

Where the thinking unfolds.

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