The latest gold rush by hoteliers in the hospitality sector is being caused by technology.
In my opinion, the world’s leading hotel groups are misguided in their belief that the future of hospitality, and the best way to create an emotional connection with guests and to make them feel happier, lies in technology.
It displays unfortunate unawareness of the true spiritual nature of hospitality, and a grave misunderstanding of what travellers and human beings in general want and need most.
NB: This is an opinion by Peter McAlpine, a senior consultant from Renaissance Consulting.
A hotel room or hotel can overflow with the latest technology, and a stay can be personalised in advance down to the 60% papaya-40% banana milkshake on arrival, but this will not help a worried, lonely, or stressed guest feel happier.
We know this from our personal life. While technology is valuable, it only provides convenience and comfort.
If hotels want to make guests truly happy and to make an emotional connection, they must go back to the spiritual roots of hospitality, as well as understand how people really feel, and what they need and want most, even though they might not admit it openly.
We all need love, much more than an abundance of technology. We all want to feel the soft and gentle energy of loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care, which are the pillars of genuine hospitality, and to hear the voice of empathy.
Technology cannot meet this need, nor can the rather mechanical, emotionless corporate care, which is enshrined in the clinically clean and sanitised SOP-Customer Satisfaction manuals.
Heart, not tech
I feel that corporate offices can no longer hear the whispers or feel the longings of the human heart. I can assure them that the human heart is not longing for more technology, as centuries of poets will attest to.
Why do corporate offices not understand this?
The financial benefits for a hotel group, which creates hotels where the guest experience is strong in the energy and spirit of loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care, are immense.
You create this spirit in a hotel by:
- teaching your staff energy techniques so that they can raise their energetic vibration, send loving energy, and remove their worries and stress
- by showing them how to heal their body’s energy system
- by helping them to open their heart so that their true loving nature becomes more and more apparent
- by deepening the staff continuously in these core values
- by changing hotel systems and leadership behaviours so that they support an energetic heart-based hospitality guest experience
You cannot create it by training and re-training SOPs so that the staff can carry them out like clockwork with 100% efficiency or by piling on the latest technology ad infinitum.
How many guests comment on TripAdvisor:
"My wife and I had the happiest time of our lives and we felt like we were in heaven because of the technology in the room."
This is not New Age fluff. You can even measure and photograph energy changes in a person; and measure the energetic change of a room or area of a hotel after using energy techniques.
You can visibly see how your staff soften; how they become gentler, kinder, and more compassionate; and how their true, loving self appears more and more.
In addition, you can see the effects of using energy by looking at the revenue figures and TripAdvisor comments, which typically refer to feelings created by the warmth, gentleness, and softness of the energetic guest experience.
This is the essential knowledge about human beings, which corporate offices are ignoring and missing as they rush by on the technology bandwagon.
They clearly do not understand energy or the energetic nature of a human being; or know that our heart and the DNA in every cell are influencing the energy of the space around us all the time according to our thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Applying this knowledge will make their hotels far more successful than just by making each guest room like a technology nerd’s personalised paradise.
Even when every technological feature possible has been added to the hotel, the guest experience can still leave the guests feeling energetically empty and without any emotional connection to the hotel.
What will hotels do then to improve the guest experience?
Well, will they say, "Oh, we need better Stuff!"?
This seems to be the thinking now. This approach to hospitality reminds me of a speech by Ken Behring, which corporate offices would be wise to think about.
Reach into the real world (for a moment)
The real estate developer (and former owner of the Seattle Seahawks) was worth about $500 million dollars at the time. During one of his speeches, he said that his life had gone through four stages.
The first stage was about "Stuff". He thought that, if he had the right stuff, he would be happy. So he bought the houses, the cars, the boat, the airplane – all of the usual toys – and yet he was not happy.
He described the second stage of his life as the acquisition of "Better Stuff".
He thought he would be happier, if he had a better house, a better car, a bigger airplane, and so on. So he bought them. But he still was not happy.
Then he thought that maybe he had focused on the wrong stuff, so he embarked on the third stage of his life, which he called "Different Stuff".
This is when he joined with a partner and bought the Seattle Seahawks. He thought for sure that, if he co-owned a professional football team, he would be happy. But he was not.
It was at this time that a friend invited Ken to join him on his private jet to fly to Europe and hand out wheelchairs to children who had been born without limbs or who had lost their legs as a result of having stepped on a landmine.
Ken accepted the invitation. Afterwards, he said that bringing hope and freedom to these children made him truly happy for the first time in his life.
He told about one of his early trips to give away wheelchairs, when he picked up an eleven-year-old boy in Mexico and gently set him down in a wheelchair.
When he went to leave and get another wheelchair for one of the other children, the boy would not let go of his leg. When Ken turned back around to face him, the boy said through his tears, "Please don’t leave yet. I want to memorize your face, so when we meet again in heaven, I can thank you one more time".
Ken said that at that moment he experienced pure joy. "When I see the happiness in the eyes of the people who get a wheelchair, I feel that this is the greatest thing I have ever achieved in my life.".
My point here is that making others happy by showing loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care is the fastest way to infuse your life and that of others with authentic love and joy.
This is what genuine hospitality aims to do.
What tech doesn't do
Technology does not touch the heart or make an emotional, heart-to-heart connection; however, the energy of loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care does. How can hotel groups say that technology is the future of hospitality?
"Oh, but our SOP-Customer Satisfaction manuals are creating the energy of love already!", I hear you say.
I beg to differ. They are creating a low vibration, efficient, and relatively emotionless guest experience, however much the PR department people spin it.
When hotels apply ancient knowledge about energy, knowledge from thought energy and heart energy research, and quantum science, and combine this with hotel service, they will be able to create and discover levels of guest experience, which they did not know are possible, and they will liken 5-Stars to a first year student project.
When a hotel creates an energetic guest experience well, the staff change, and so does the energetic feeling of the guest experience and the hotel.
The staff become softer, gentler, and happier, and the desire to make guests happier grows from within. Hospitality takes on a different meaning and feeling to what it has become.
Hotels can increase this happiness using ancient energy techniques, such as love energy meditations and certain Tibetan meditations, as well as by using music and frequencies which restore the chakras.
The desire to make others happy and to show loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care grows very noticeably. In short, their real, hidden self comes through from behind the mask in all its beauty.
Compare this to what we can expect from technology-based hospitality.
The energy of emotion is what makes human beings happy; emotions created by loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care, for example.
These used to be the essential core values of hospitality before it was westernised and corporatised, and all feeling was removed by the need for efficiency and the need to have a corporate template, which could be cloned to any new hotel in any country.
Can we reverse the rising tide?
The current paradigm about hospitality and about what a guest experience should feel like needs changing. It is obsolete and not aligned with human nature and people’s needs.
I realize that it is not yet corporate or politically respectable for corporate offices to dare to consider using energy to create the guest experience, but it works and makes a lot of money for hotels that create it.
I encourage hotel group CEOs to review their narrow focus on technology. The use of energy to create the guest experience is the only direction, which the hotel industry has not looked at.
Maybe because hoteliers do not believe or are unaware of the voluminous scientific research into energy, which has been carried out for at least 80 years, and which merely confirms what ancient traditions and cultures have known for thousands of years.
The hotel industry will never achieve its potential until it embraces energy.
One day, using energy will be the main way in which the guest experience is created, especially as hotels evolve inevitably into places of wellness, restoring wellbeing, and healing. Technology will just be a part of the guest experience.
Hotels will compete over the energetic feeling of their guest experience and hospitality. What will happen to the hotels and hotel groups, which fail or refuse to recognize this, is anyone’s guess.
NB: This is an opinion by Peter McAlpine, a senior consultant from Renaissance Consulting.
NB2:Hotel key image via Shutterstock.