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The New Normal or Business As Usual?
By Jochen Ehrhardt - Exclusive for 4Hoteliers.com
Thursday, 13th April 2023
 

Exclusive Feature: My last article was on the importance of EQ (Emotional Intelligence) and how it is assessed or not.

Also Read: The Big EQ (Emotional Intelligence) Illusion! - By Jochen Ehrhardt - Exclusive for 4Hoteliers.com

As the feedback I have received from the hospitality community was kind of thin, perhaps due to the inherent complexity of the subject, this time I have decided to write about very tangible issues, straight from the madness of the every day world. It is once again not such good news for the industry. Please take a read.

Last week, a marketing executive of one of the top three large luxury hospitality brands promised me “….an element of surprise for an elevated guest experience”. I guess she was referring to positive surprises.

While this sounded very enticing, I instantly recalled the hundreds of guest experiences I had had in comparable establishments in recent years. They were mostly mediocre, rarely memorable and for sure without any element of (positive) surprise. Actually, I did remember the last time hotel staff managed to wow me, the Four Seasons Hotel Lion Place in St. Petersburg back in early 2020.

Naturally, that begs the question, do I really need to be wowed, do I need to be positively surprised while staying at a high-end hotel? If it means staff are going the extra mile, trying to be pro-active, definitely yes, that would be desirable, at least from time to time.

However, if I had just one wish for hospitality executives, I’d rather see the basics covered before aspiring to anything fancy. I am convinced this is a fairly representative opinion among luxury travelers and professional observers of the luxury hotel industry, at least those who can afford to be independent and unbiased, telling it like it is.

To put things into perspective and put some meat on the bone, here’s the ultimate list of some of the most commonly made, service-related mistakes, flaws, and shortcomings in the world’s best hotels and resorts. Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that all of those errors happen all the time at all the establishments, however, they do occur too often:

  • Generally, hotels increasingly come across as “commercial”, i.e. luxury hotels that are standardized, and therefore predictably boring; deliver inattentive, sloppy, standardized service; are stingy, providing subpar/cost-driven value in beauty products, amenities and F&B; treat the return on investment and profit maximization as paramount; are cold and soulless, lacking a true host with heart; generate a high degree of tour operator and/or group business; are perceived as business hotels; provide low value for money; make the guest feel like a (credit card) number.
  • The “How Are You?” greeting panacea can be quite irritating, being trite and overused.
  • Calling guests by their names is great, but overdoing it is not.
  • The so called background music which provides another great opportunity to connect with guests emotionally is often too loud, uninspiring, dull, repetitive and detached from the hotel’s environment and main clientele.
  • The check-in is mechanical, being centered around passport and credit card.
  • Check-in amenity consists of dry fruit or other blood-sugar level raisers.
  • The welcome card personalization is limited to the guest’s name.
  • Rooming? The motto seems to be, time is of the essence and don’t ask the guest anything to prolong it, resulting in a random and incomplete procedure. Reminds me of hotel websites, nice try but a lot of relevant content unlocatable.
  • The former guest’s hair is still present, at least in the bathroom.
  • The infamous tucking of bed cover under the mattress, despite its obvious disadvantages for the guest, has still not been questioned by many hotels, although-Four Seasons was one of the first to abandon this senseless practice.
  • In the vast majority of cases, blacking out a hotel room remains theory, not necessarily because the curtains don’t do the job, which unfortunately they all too often don’t, but their work is undone by flashing lights and A/C switches on the wall. However, there is a technical solution for this issue, as applied by the Four Seasons Hotel in Taormina.
  • The guest is awoken by the hotel’s housekeeping staff, sometimes by ringing the door bell as early as 9:30.
  • Shortly thereafter, the guest finds himself in a crowded breakfast venue that exudes the charm and the atmosphere of a canteen.
  • Serving cappuccino with oat milk without comment.
  • Staff remove used plates without asking the guest’s permission.
  • A refill for coffee, tea or juice is offered late or not at all.
  • Breakfast closes at 10:00 or 10:30, so that staff have sufficient time to set the tables for lunch.
  • Guests exceeding the breakfast time frame are ignored.
  • Vegetarian and vegan meal options continue to lead a shadowy existence in 2023.
  • For any meal, crumbing down the table has apparently gone out of fashion.
  • Offering water for the journey upon check-out has suffered a similar fate, unless the hotel’s limousine service is used.
  • Not pouring a sample in front of the guest when ordering just a glass of wine is more in keeping in a pub establishment.
  • Similar approach to beer, except a sample is not needed.
  • Staff are making assumptions on guests’ preferences, instead of simply asking.
  • Hotel employees, even from Sales & Marketing, apart from the obvious, are typically not knowledgeable about many of the product’s details they are supposed to provide experiences in, or sell.
  • Following up on any deficiencies almost never happens. Makes one really wonder.
  • Where’s the General Manager? The absence of the GM in the lobby has been discussed for some time.

We could go on and on. No need to be complete here. Luxury hoteliers know what they signed up for. As everyone acknowledges, it’s all in the details, many of them, perhaps too many.

Here’s the unfortunate bottom line:

  • Hotels have assimilated mediocrity across the board.
  • Their approach to quality does not differentiate them at all.
  • A pure and relentless “me too” approach. What works elsewhere, must work here too.
  • Too many of the so called iconic hotels are just famous for being famous.
  • Luxury hospitality brands don’t differentiate. They are a downside protection for the consumer though when selecting a place to stay. The weekly emergence of yet another new “lifestyle” brand, often an offspring of well-known luxury brands, is not helping either.
  • The owner of a hotel pays for the hardware, so, from a consumer point of view a non-yield/profit driven private investor is the optimum, followed by a strategic investor/owner and, worst case, a financial investor/owner. In most cases, the type of investor that owns a hotel is clear.
  • Similar rules apply to the operator: For example, does the operator have a clear focus on the luxury segment, is the operator owned by a more-relaxed ultra-high-net worth individual, or perhaps a real-estate conglomerate that is primarily into adding value by quickly amassing fee income with the exit strategy already in place?
  • This begs the question: In addition to assessing hotels, shouldn’t we also value owners and operators when looking for a hotel in which to spend our holidays?
  • Are hoteliers merely administrators as opposed to hosts these days, many of them appearing to be overwhelmed with work? Are they to blame or is it the system in which they operate? Or, do we perhaps expect too much from them?
  • While the right standards for evaluation make sense to some degree, in practise they are best used when the guests don’t notice they are used. Standards, i.e. standardization, is ideally limited to areas where they are without any alternative (benchmarking has never improved any hotel), for example, when assessing a hotel’s website. Knowhow based on experience coupled with intuition and the skills of a hyper sensitive person who understands the effect and use of the emotional scale, are ideal to assess and perfect any hotel offering.
  • When the emotional component of the interaction between guest and employees is assessed and trained, it needs to be done properly, in order to avoid the detrimental effects that we are seeing when traditional quality assurance falls short.
  • Delivering a service vs delivering an experience. Not that simple.

The bottom line for the consumer is, provided he/she cares about value for money, it might sometimes be smarter to pick a top 4-star establishment instead of a 5-star hotel. However, if one prefers to stick within the 5-star realm, additionally one could check if the owner and operator is a financial investor who tends to be after the guests’ last penny, or a more relaxed private individual.

Just a reminder:

A hotel is an enterprise whose business and main objective is to make money through renting rooms and selling ancillary services such as food, beverages, spa services etc. Delivering experiences is desirable but not necessarily needed if customers buy irregardless.

Jochen Ehrhardt is the Founder of TRUE 5 STARS Advisory — Quality Assurance perfecting 5-star plus offerings through a heavy focus on human interactions, and the founder of TRUE 5 STARS, an online platform that focuses on just the top 1,000 hotels in the world. He has personally inspected over 2,000 of the world’s best hotels.

Jochen can be contacted at: jochen.ehrhardt@true5stars.com or www.true5stars.com/advisory

This is strictly an exclusive feature, reprints of this article in any shape or form without prior written approval from 4Hoteliers.com is not permitted.

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