Here’s a touching video about showing care in leadership. Click here. Question: What emotion is “care” a part of? … Love, of course. Hoteliers, you teach love to all your children, don’t you? Also, you want your life to be filled with love. However, the hotel industry seems to have made the word “love” a forbidden word, a taboo word.
In the hotel industry, you are allowed to say “We care for our guests!” regardless of whether you mean it or show it or not. You’ll sometimes even see “care” on a hotel group or hotel website as being one of their core values. But heaven forbid that you want to make unconditional love one of your core values! Oh, no, no, no! That’s just not proper in the hotel industry! No self-respecting Executive Board member would dare to suggest its inclusion! The person would become a laughing stock in the corporate office and asked to take sick leave.
Joking aside, the hotel industry is all about satisfying guests according to SOP manuals because the industry uses the SOP-Customer Satisfaction concept. Satisfying guests is all that is possible in the industry because the underlying concept is like an anchor that is pulling the industry down. So, hotels could not suddenly start to talk about unconditional love anyway. It wouldn’t work.
The little girl cared for her brother in the dark because she loves him. It is so, so silly that “love” is the Mother of All Taboo Words in the hotel industry. Love is the Lord Voldemort of the hospitality industry – the word that cannot be spoken.
One day though, a hotel group will decide that it is good for business to say “We love our guests!”. Indeed, I saw recently a video by Four Seasons that included the word “love”. I was surprised because you won’t find a hotel company grounded more deeply in SOP-Customer Satisfaction and traditional service than Four Seasons. I can’t see Four Seasons upgrading the group from this concept, so love won’t take root in their culture and nothing will change.
However, I expect that other hotel groups will soon jump on the bandwagon, and “love” will become the latest buzzword just like a few hotel groups are using the word “heart” while being clueless about it. But unless the hotel groups transform their internal organization and particularly their Human Resources and Training systems, these will just be empty words and nothing will change because the hotel groups have to upgrade themselves from the SOP-Customer Satisfaction concept first.
Indeed, if hotels continue to use the mid-twentieth-century concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction, nothing can change and the industry will continue to be stuck in the Rut of Tradition.
There’s a parallel to this back in 2005. Do you remember CTME? It stands for Creating Truly Memorable Experiences. It became all the rage in the industry back then! But the industry continued to use SOP-Customer Satisfaction so nothing changed.
CTME was a spiritual and energetic concept and a much less developed version of Heart-Based Hospitality. The concept failed to change the hospitality experience because the industry would not move on from SOP-Customer Satisfaction.
History is inevitably going to be repeated because the industry refuses to move on from what suited the world in the middle of the twentieth century. “Love” and “heart” will become fashionable buzzwords, but the spirit of hospitality won’t change in the slightest.
