The second Lifestyle/Boutique Hotel Development Conference kicked off Tuesday morning with an informative and sometimes contentious discussion about the lifestyle and boutique segments from a panel of industry heavyweights.

Lodging Hospitality sponsored the event at the Fontainebleau in Miami in conjunction with HVS Hotel Management and featured approximately 200 owners, operators, investors and others focused on the growing lifestyle and boutique segments.

Richard Millard, the CEO of Tecton Hospitality and Desires Hotels, described 2009 as a “total disaster,” but said the last six months have improved. It’s the same story that’s been told for almost every segment of the lodging industry, but Fred Kleisner, CEO of Morgans Hotel Group, said the lifestyle and boutique segments “dive the deepest and fastest” because the marketing mix is 90-percent transient—business and leisure—but “we also come back the furthest and fastest.”

Janis Cannon, InterContinental Hotel Group’s vice president of global brand management for Hotel Indigo, said her brand has opened five properties this year versus 13 in 2009. Richard Kessler, who owns and operates 10 independent properties, has seen an eight-percent increase in occupancy this year—helped by seven of those hotels joining Marriott’s new Autograph Collection—and expects a double-digit increase in revenue per available room next year, “hopefully in the mid-teens.”

The panel also agreed there was still limited financing available—at best—for new construction. Kleisner said that wasn’t going to change anytime soon, and Kessler added it’s “almost a waste of time to even be looking.” Raul Leal, the president and chief operating officer for the new Virgin Hotels brand, said lenders are opening up in some markets and constructive conversations were at least being started.

Where the panel diverged and debated was with the differences between lifestyle and boutique, and whether a boutique could be branded. On lifestyle vs. boutique, Millard said customers didn’t know the difference and it was just industry terminology. Kessler said the differences were like comparing apples and oranges.

Definitions for both segments were hard to ascertain and the concept of “branded boutiques,” as Cannon described Hotel Indigo, was met with resistance from Millard, who said the term was an oxymoron.

Kleisner explained that his boutique customers bought jeans from small boutique shops and if they ever saw those jeans at a Neiman Marcus, “they’d burn them.”

“If our customers thought we were a chain, they’d stop coming,” he added.

Cannon said Hotel Indigo could pull off the balancing act as a branded boutique by being different in every location. “All tell a local story,” she said, adding that IHG was committed to growing in primary markets like Boston, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and San Francisco after the first phase of growth in secondary markets.

No matter the definition of lifestyle or boutique, the panel agreed that selling an experience and focusing on culture were the keys to success. “It’s all about people,” Leal said. “You must maintain that culture” even during the challenging times, “because this truly is an operating business.”