In 1987, at the tender age of 26, Chip Conley decided to get into the hotel business, so he checked out a motel in the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco everyone called the "no tell" motel. It was a throwback to midcentury motor lodges, and Mr. Conley fell in love instantly. He inquired about it with the owner, who informed him the motel was, in fact, doing quite well: its occupancy rate was 142 percent. Sensing Mr. Conley's confusion, the owner explained, "Well, when you're renting hourly, you can rent a room more than once a day."
"I was like, 'Oh wow. I don't think my mom will like this,' " Mr. Conley recalled.
That motel became the Phoenix Hotel, which welcomed the likes of David Bowie and Nirvana. It also signaled the beginning of Joie de Vivre Hotels, a company Mr. Conley oversaw as chief executive until he stepped down in 2010.
Mr. Conley now has turned to his attention to a different kind of travel: festivals. This month he introduced Fest300, a Web site that aims to cover 300 festivals around the world, starting with the 40 Mr. Conley is attending this year. From artistic gatherings like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to religious festivals like Diwali in Mumbai, the Web site gives details like a festival's history, directions to it and what to pack.
For a festival like the whirling Mevlevi dervishes' commemoration of the death of the Sufi mystic Rumi, in Turkey, Fest300 is one of the few resources on the Web that provide practical information on it. It's been going on for hundreds of years, said Mr. Conley. "So I guess they feel they don't need a Web site."
Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Conley, who, looking back on his career, explains what boutique hotels have in common with dancing in a crowd of thousands.
On boutique versus chain: Every hotel we created for Joie de Vivre, we based it upon a magazine and five adjectives, so the Phoenix was Rolling Stone magazine and funky, irreverent, adventurous, cool and young at heart. The people who fell in love with it, I found, might use those adjectives to describe themselves. I call it identity refreshment: the personality of the hotel rubs off on you. Boutique hotels, they're not just smaller or have better design than chain hotels. Their magic is in creating an emotional experience for the customer, in making them feel like they're better versions of themselves.
On why he is a nonstop festivalgoer: I was in New York last year, doing a talk for my last book, when a woman during the Q and A session said, "I'm not a stalker" — which is always a bad way to start a question — "but I know your favorite place on earth is Bali, and you're on the board of Burning Man. Bali and Burning Man are two of my favorite experiences too. Why are we so in love with them?"
On stage, in front of hundreds of people, I began to try to answer: "Bali is like an endless festival. It has this communal village spirit, and everyone is artistically interested in the next festival. The ultimate life experience is your cremation, which itself is a festival. And Burning Man has this collective effervescence, this sense of losing yourself in the group connection. Now it may be you took too many drugs or you're streaking, but what Burning Man is really about is utopian culture, and it has this very strong artistic component. That's what you're losing yourself in."
I always felt travel is transformative. It's not just a vacation where you vacate yourself. It's, how do you explore something bigger than yourself, something that gives you some sense of transcendence? And festivals do that in the context of a group social experience. It's social-identity refreshment, connecting you with others outside your own little digital device. Long story short, I said on stage suddenly, "I want to become the world's leading expert on festivals." And that's how Fest300 started.
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