Today’s post is a different kind of post, a post which you have probably been waiting for so long, the meaning behind us , the Illa Experience Hotel.
It is said that there are many techniques and strategies to draw people’s attention to something. Use of vivid colors, bold fonts, rhymes among others are some of the most common that you might have heard of. However I must say that there are some exceptions or one technique that many do not know and that is love.
That is the case with Illa, we never even tried to look for those techniques when it came to giving the house a name. (Yes, I said house and not hotel), love gave it a name. From the moment that we first saw the house, to the moment that we were blessed to have it and until now we will always see Illa
So, how did illa become Illa?
In a country full of loving people and wonders, we had always dreamed of having a house in Quito that would welcome many people from different places around the world to treasure Quito and Ecuador as a travel destination. For our dream to come true we wanted to provide jobs to many people that were willing to offer smiles and love to those who surround them.
We did not want to be in a house and keep it only to ourselves, we wanted to share our house by providing jobs and showing Ecuadorian’s essence which is full of love, hard work, effort and dreams. Hence the idea of the hotel came up.
For us, shaping our dream into a hotel was one of the nicest plans we could have ever imagined. You want to know why? Even though many people associate the concept of hotels to a 200 room standardized big building, for us it is something completely different.
Our house is meant to transmit good venture, hope, love, effort and hard work because those features are what characterize us as real humans, and so it happened; during a night of brainstorming and thinking about the perfect term that would reflect what we really are the term Illa came up.
Illa is a Quechua word for good venture, peace, blessings and hope. I must confess that the brainstorming we thought was going to take hours, took less than three minutes. The word Illa, its meaning, its delicate and harmonious sound was just what we needed. After all that is what our dream represents, a family that tries to be light in others lives.
And so that is Illa, well a little tiny taste of it, because for this dream to build many things happened, some beautiful, some not. But that story, Illa’s story, is meant for another post, isn’t it?
“It started as a dream, then shaped into a blessing, then transformed into reality. Illa wants to be light, good venture and hope to those who come in, stay and leave.”
