I think that the trend towards introducing more and more technology into hotels reflects how the hotel industry has lost its way, and how it is searching with some desperation to infuse hospitality with what hoteliers feel instinctively is missing.
What is missing is the spiritual essence of hospitality, namely loving-kindness and compassion, and the resulting heart-warming care, which flows more and more as the essence is restored. Technology and increasing efficiency will not restore this essence.
But it is hard for hoteliers, who have been raised in the materialistic concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction, to conceive that anything other than technology and increased efficiency can provide what is missing in hospitality. “Spirituality” and “Love” are not words, which you hear in corporate boardrooms or at hotel conferences, it seems. I wrote articles over many years about how to restore this spiritual essence in practical ways, though I did not touch on everything because I felt that I was writing into the wind.
Heart-Based Hospitality is about using human energy to create an energetic guest experience, which is based on the spiritual essence of hospitality. Though it will become known by different names, this will be the future of hospitality – how it will be created and provided.
The hotel guest experience will feel very different in the future. You will feel it energetically because we all have an energy system, though education systems and corporate offices ignore its existence or are unaware of it. But when corporate offices discover energy and discover how you can use it, energetic, Heart-Based hospitality rooted in loving-kindness, compassion, and the resulting heart-warming care, will sweep the whole industry and revolutionise it. There will be an immense shake-up because some giant hotel groups will surely fall by the wayside as they either resist change or cannot change quickly enough.
As hotel staff become their true self more and more, they will want to show loving-kindness and compassion more and more, without having to be told to do so. But that beautiful future is still at least 10-15 years away because the hotel industry is stuck in materialistic thinking about the nature of hospitality.
The corporate folks who dominate the world of hospitality would realise that they have lost their way if they were to ask themselves: “Is what we provide the highest spiritual level of hospitality, which mankind can create? Does it reflect the spiritual essence of what every religious tradition has taught?”
