How a few 'disastrous weekends away' inspired one couple to create a booking service specializing in the world's sexiest boutique and luxury hotels

• Mr & Mrs Smith is a travel club and online hotel booking service specializing in romantic getaways for couples.
• The married cofounders, Tamara and James Lohan, came up with the idea for their company after a few underwhelming hotel stays early in their relationship.
• Initially, the two partnered with select "tastemakers" to determine the best romantic boutique and luxury hotels, releasing a guidebook with these reviews.
• The Lohans eventually pivoted their business from solely printed guidebooks to the online hospitality space. Today, Mr & Mrs Smith is a hotel booking website with over 1,300 villa and hotel partners.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

There's no shortage of travel guides, rankings, and lists out there, but few focus on as specific a niche as Mr & Mrs Smith.

Billing itself as "the travel club for hotel lovers," Mr & Mrs Smith is a boutique and luxury hotel booking service that curates a list of the best hotels in the world for romantic getaways. Their current roster includes over 1,300 properties, from a boho-chic hotel in Budapest with nightly rates under $100 to a private island villa in the Seychelles that'll set you back nearly $5,000 for a single evening's stay.

Founded in 2003, the company was inspired by a series of "disastrous" weekend getaways experienced by its cofounders, married couple Tamara and James Lohan (now 47 and 49, respectively). The two met on vacation and struck up a holiday romance. In the early days of their relationship, they frequently took weekend trips - but by and large, the trips were a bust.

"When we were dating, we would search through the brochures - because it was pre-internet - and search through magazines and those really stuffy, big, thick doorstep brochures from various hotel brands," Tamara told Business Insider at a recent event for the release of their report "Modern Love: Exploring the future of romantic travel," in collaboration with futures consultancy company Future Laboratory. "And we'd arrive at the hotels and get bitterly disappointed."

"I often was the one that was booking them, because I was trying to impress her," James added. "And he was failing," Tamara interjected.

The two decided to create a guidebook of hotels that had the vibe they, a young couple on romantic weekend getaways, were looking for.

"I think, quite often, hotel inspectors were these long-faced, 80-year-old gray-faced men in my mind, going off and inspecting hotels and writing notes while chewing on their prawn cocktail on a Monday night, telling me what I was going to do with my gorgeous girlfriend on the weekend," James said. "And it didn't really match."

The couple turned to their friends and friends-of-friends as tastemakers for help curating a "little black book" - the first iteration of Mr & Mrs Smith. These early travel influencers included everyone from Felix Burton of the popular 1990s English electronic music duo Basement Jaxx and the owner of famed VIP nightclub Chinawhite in London to a former editor of the Sunday Times Style section.

Tamara, who formerly worked in marketing, and James, who ran nightclubs and an events company, would send their tastemakers - along with significant others - to the hotels they were considering for inclusion. In 2005, the cofounders expanded their business from travel guidebooks to a full-blown booking website.

Today, Mr & Mrs Smith employs more than 50 experts in London, Ibiza, New York, Los Angeles, and Singapore. There are three membership levels: BlackSmith (the basic membership, which is free) and two paid services - SilverSmith and GoldSmith - that charge an annual membership fee. The upper levels come with additional perks like an in-house concierge service, money back on hotel stays, and half-price offers.

In 2015, the BBC's Peter Shadbolt reported that for each reservation made via the Mr & Mrs Smith website, the booked hotel pays the company a commission (though hotel industry analyst Andrew Sangster told the BBC that "there doesn't seem to be any fixed rules or levels" when it comes to how much commission the hotels pay). Per Shadbolt, the two paid membership levels also provide a portion of Mr & Mrs Smith's revenue.

What makes a hotel "boutique"? It's all about attitude

The cofounders told Business Insider that due to their niche focus, their list of hotel partners is constantly changing. New properties are added, and existing partners that don't uphold the Mr & Mrs Smith standards are cut.

James noted that while it's almost impossible for a hotel to get every criteria point right, "... you can definitely tell if something's a problem." He described the brand's customers as their new eyes and ears, while noting that the Mr and Mrs Smith team personally still also visits every single property.

Like others in the industry, Tamara and James acknowledge that the term "boutique hotel" is amorphous. "The problem now is that everyone's on the boutique bandwagon, and so you have 2,000-room hotels that call themselves 'boutique.' So for me, it's an attitude rather than size," James told Business Insider. "Though of course size is an indicator. And the average size of our hotel is probably 40 bedrooms."

But, as Tamara noted, even large hotels can have an intimate sense of space: "There's some very large hotels where you walk into the lobby and you would not know that there are hundreds of rooms above you."

Moreso than size, Tamara and James and their team analyze a hotel's experience.

"We care more about how comfortable that bed is. Is it Egyptian cotton - or Indian cotton now, which is very in vogue? Is it the best and the most comfortable bed you've ever slept in? Can the barman mix me a perfect martini? These are the things that matter," James said.

"We do look at the sound, the lighting, the mood, the atmosphere, the type of service. Is it attentive but not too overbearing? It's about so many things and it's just about this feeling - it's a feeling that you can't photograph and you can't always write," he said.