admin June 1, 2026
Hospitality Is a Spiritual Path Trodden With Practical Feet.
Hospitality is a spiritual path trodden with practical feet. The essential core values of hospitality are Love, Compassion, and Heart-warming Care. Unfortunately, Love is not yet an acceptable word in hotel industry corporate offices. But at some time in the future, hospitality will return to its essence and the goal will be the holistic transformation of every guest.
Heart-Based Hospitality not only has a different foundation to the pervasive, emotionless, and mechanistic service concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction, but it is also created in very different ways – in ways which create an ever-increasing desire in hotel staff to want to transform the lives of the guests through Love, Compassion, and Heart-warming Care, and which include ancient and scientifically proven energy techniques.
When I created Heart-Based Hospitality for the hotel industry about 14 years ago I did not realise that it would be so hard for hotel corporate offices to understand and accept. I think that Heart-Based Hospitality is so difficult for them to accept because it belongs to the future of hospitality when the essential core values of hospitality become the main core values again; and their mechanistic Newtonian worldview of corporate offices has been replaced by the Quantum worldview.
This video gives an idea of the level of Love, Compassion, and Heart-warming Care, which will become the norm in hospitality, and how hospitality will become so individualized, personalised, compassionate, loving, and caring. That future is possible now, but the level of corporate understanding about this does not yet exist.
SOP-Customer Satisfaction Is an Obsolete Concept
The global hotel industry uses an obsolete concept, which I call SOP-Customer Satisfaction, to create the guest experience. It is mechanistic in nature and denies the existence of consciousness and its effect on the world. It also does not accept that mind affects matter, and that our thoughts, feelings, and emotions can affect other people and places. It is like a dogma, which seemingly all corporate offices have bought into and uphold. The system of star ratings fits nicely into this concept.
Heaven forbid that you question this Orthodoxy! If you question it, like I have for many years now, you should not expect to find a listening corporate ear or to be invited to speak at an international hotel industry conference. Indeed, none of the status quo-supporting hotel magazines will publish articles, which question this orthodoxy.
The corporate offices seem to be completely unaware that the mechanistic Newtonian worldview, which underlies SOP-Customer Satisfaction, is holding back the hotel industry from creating countless levels of hospitality, which are considered impossible in the corporate worldview. Hopefully, one day the hotel industry will discover the limitations of the Newtonian worldview and will upgrade itself to the quantum worldview, which started in 1925.
The following TEDx talk was banned because it questioned the scientific orthodoxy upon which the mechanistic concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction is based.
The Hotel Industry Needs More Women on Hotel Group Boards
A revolution in hospitality will happen, I believe, when there are many more female CEOs in hotel group Boardrooms, and the Boards are 50%+ female. I believe that it is much easier for women to see that hospitality has become disconnected from its timeless essence of love, kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. The male-dominated Boards cannot see this, and they persist with the obsolete concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction.
I have written individually to the Board members of 70+ hotel groups 3 years in a row, and none seems to understand this. (Two people nearly did, to be fair.)
If women ran the hotel industry, I doubt that we would have seen a proliferation of brands because when you are aware of the astonishing impact that hospitality can have when it is connected to its timeless essence, the differentiator between hotels becomes the energy and spirit of the hospitality and not the physical aspects.
The spirit of loving kindness and compassion, and the energy staff exude and which guests feel, can be increased limitlessly when you know how. Maybe in 20 or so years hotel Boards will discover this. When they do, hospitality will evolve in ways, which we can scarcely imagine now.
Here’s to the Crazy Ones!
The message here is simple: Question the status quo. Don’t just accept the current ideas, direction, and guest experience concept of the leading hotel groups. The hotel industry needs rebels and non-conformists – lots of them! Otherwise, mankind will be stuck with the SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience for goodness knows how many more years. There are an infinite number of levels of hospitality above 5 Stars, but they cannot be reached until the hotel industry moves on from this obsolete concept.
The Latest “Next Big Thing” Is … Lots of Brands!
I love this article! It shows that the hotel industry is looking desperately for the Next Big Thing and just can’t find it anywhere. Everyone thinks that creating a brand is it, so they are all dashing down this path. “We have 100 brands! We’re the best!” When the total of brands reaches 3,000, 4,000, or even 5,000 (human creativity is limitless, after all) a respectable Big Wig in a corporate office will say: “OK, everyone. Maybe the Next Big Thing is …” Then everyone will dash in that direction, not wishing to be left behind. Then eventually, everyone will discover that it was yet another illusion, and they’ll wait for the next fad to follow, hoping desperately …. But all the while, the Big Thing, which they are all looking for, has literally been in front of their eyes all along and closer than their life’s vein, but they just couldn’t see it because the Big Thing, which will revolutionise the hotel industry globally, is in the human heart and the heart’s energy field. One day love and energy will be accepted in respectable corporate circles, but dear readers, that’s a story for another generation.
Tradition Is Holding Back Hospitality
I think that hoteliers have got so used to the traditional way of creating the guest experience by training mechanical-like SOPs and service steps, which produces a rather mechanistic, emotionless kind of guest experience. I don’t think that they can imagine a better way to creating hospitality. They certainly can’t conceive that limitless, higher levels of hospitality can be created – levels, which are energetically strong, soft and gentle, and infused with the spiritual essence of hospitality, namely, loving kindness, compassion and heart-warming care.
When you develop the spiritual capacity of employees, and work with their human energy and with energy generally, you change the employees in ways, which traditional methods cannot dream of doing; and the employees create a unique spirit of hospitality, which people dismiss as impossible when you tell them about it.
But one day in the future “love” and “energy” will become acceptable words in hotel corporate Board Rooms, and what hoteliers generally now consider desirable but impossible, will become the norm.
The Hotel Industry Is Going Around in Circles
To me the industry’s focus yet again on the Lobby shows how hotel group corporate offices continue to scratch their heads about what to do to create an exceptional guest experience. The industry goes in a circle in which people revisit the same areas again and again. “Let’s look at the Lobby / Colours / Design / Room Amenities / Bathroom Amenities / The Spa / Beds / Smells / Technology / CRM / etc. again. The Next Big Thing is surely there. Yes, siree!”
Corporate hoteliers keep looking outwards for the Next Big Thing while it is inside them … us. They won’t find it in some material thing that can be bought or by changing the Lobby again.
The industry is completely unaware that the hotel guest industry will be revolutionised when the spiritual qualities of love and compassion become the essence of hospitality again, and the industry discovers how to use human energy to transform the guest experience and to create in hotel staff the desire to want to show love and compassion to every guest. Until then, the industry will continue to go in circles searching desperately for the Next Big Thing..
The Importance of Opening the Heart of the Staff
In conventional hotel hospitality the staff are trained to carry out their job duties as efficiently as they possible. They should show friendliness and care, but the spirit or energetic feeling of the hospitality they provide is not the main thing. But depending on whether their heart is open or closed, they will create a very different feeling in the guests, and a very different spirit and energy in the hotel.
When creating Heart-Based Hospitality the foundation is to open the hearts of the hotel staff. Some staff respond very quickly while others need more time. Depending on their life experiences, some may need a much longer time. In contrast, opening the heart of the staff is not a feature of conventional hotel training though; hence the very obvious difference of spirit between SOP-Customer Satisfaction and Heart-Based Hospitality.
2. What Does It Mean to Have an Open Heart?
Having an open heart is an ideal state of being. When your heart is open, you let love flow through you. You feel open, accepting, and expansive. You feel wonderful, and it is a feeling you want to experience all the time. You want to show loving kindness, compassion, and care to others, and this desire grows inside you as your heart opens. There are many ways to open the heart and to create this wonderful happiness.
When your heart opens, you feel like a rose opening, with waves of warm energy vibrating within the center of your chest, then emanating outward from your body in all directions. With this energetic expansion comes a sense of love, peace, and spiritual attunement with everyone and everything. As the blind Helen Keller said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”
3. Opening the Heart Increases the Intensity of Energy Flowing Through Us
When we experience an unrestricted flow of loving energy flowing through our open heart, we feel relaxed, loving, and compassionate toward everyone and everything around us. We experience a sense of well-being; and we have the ability to tap into energy from our source to be creative in our lives.
4. 11 Signs That Your Heart Is Open.
• You have a song in your heart.
• Your heart centre feels warm and peaceful.
• You smile and laugh easily.
• You show affection towards others.
• You love to hug.
• You see the good in people.
• You ignore the “bad” in people.
• You are open to new experiences.
• You accept people just the way they are.
• You show interest in others.
• You are in love with life.
5. Human Beings Are Energetic
To really understand the concept of an open heart; how to open the heart; and the benefits for hospitality of doing so, you have to accept that the world is also energetic in nature; that human beings are energetic beings; and that we have an energy system, which includes energy centres (chakras) and energy pathways that can get blocked and unblocked. When corporate offices discover the energetic nature of human beings and the world, the hotel industry will experience a revolution and an evolution in hospitality the likes of which have never been seen.
However, this revolution is still many years away. When William Harvey suggested in 1628 that blood was pumped by the heart and flowed through the body in arteries, he was shunned and ridiculed. Now nobody disputes this. An equivalent now in the corporate offices of the hotel industry is the energetic nature of human beings and the world, and how energy can be used to transform the spirit of hospitality.
6. Open-heartedness is Associated with Being Warm and Kind
If you see a person crying you probably can relate to him or her. An open heart empathizes with others, acknowledging their difficulties. Then the heart delves deeper into compassion, walking in another’s shoes, so to speak.
For example, when you encounter a person from a war-torn country, you heart goes out to them. You feel their losses, connecting with your journey and ordeals, too, and you feel deep caring about their suffering.
An open heart accesses the realms beyond logic, where inner feeling, hearing and seeing exist. It connects with your inner knowing, where you just know it is true or right, although you cannot prove it.
The open heart detects nuances in people’s voices and facial expressions. It can find the sublime in works of art. For instance, it feels people’s souls in a portrait.
In addition, the open heart uses gratitude to stay present with one’s life. It feels beyond itself, connecting to others in appreciative and respectful ways.
The open heart both gives and receives love. It readily offers genuine praise and receives feedback (both positive and negative). When your heart is open, you listen carefully and respond graciously.
Heart Based Hospitality May Still Be a Generation Away
I think that in the corporate offices of hotel groups, understanding about the possibilities of Heart-Based Hospitality may be another generation away. I say this because after contacting the Board Members of over 70 hotel groups for over 3 years in a row there seems to be a refusal to even consider that there could be a better direction than the traditional guest experience concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any corporate hotelier daring to question it at the moment.
What Does Heart-Based Living Mean?
For many people nowadays, the mind controls much of their lives, despite the intuitive nudging they constantly receive from the heart. The mind dictates their understanding, actions, reactions and decisions, based largely on learned response patterns, which seem to have a lock on their lives. Time and again, the heart seeks to intervene, to offer advice – but quite often the mind overrides that advice.
HeartMath founder Doc Childre explains: “Heart-based living refers to all intentions and actions that express qualities of the heart in daily life. These heart qualities can include things like appreciating or caring for others, expressing kindness to those around you and giving back by volunteering to work with others to relieve suffering in humans or animals and to help the planet.” Love and compassion can be added to the heart qualities.
Throughout history, people have said that we should follow our heart. “Why?” Childre asks. “Because people instinctively know that their heart’s intuition yields the highest outcome – often at the expense of the mind’s opinions, preferences and habits.”
“Heart-based living is about including your heart’s intuition as you navigate through life’s relationships and events. This brings balance to your mind and emotions and unfolds your authentic self.” (Doc Childre, founder of HeartMath)
With this in mind, corporate hoteliers must surely feel intuitively that something is missing from their guest experience and that SOP-Customer Satisfaction does not and cannot provide it. I cannot believe that they would like their married life or family life to be based on SOP-Customer Satisfaction, yet they have decided that this is how hospitality should be provided to mankind.
Heart Based Hospitality Uses the Heart as an Organ of Perception
Our indigenous ancestors, however, would respond to the same question by pointing to their hearts. They understood the heart’s ability to intelligently perceive and decipher the world around them, and acknowledged the limitations and reductionist nature of living in a manner in which one relies primarily on the mind.
They went beyond the thoughts in their heads, using the heart as an organ of perception to connect with the energy fields of other organisms – not just other humans, but the earth as well – in order to fully immerse themselves in the deeper meanings embodying their thoughts.
Engaging in this kind of heart-based perception and communication with the world tends to render what once seemed important as relatively meaningless, and what once seemed meaningless as meaningful. When a person breathes in the meaning of another organism using their heart field, a subtle shift occurs within, whether subtle or major, that forever changes them. The ancient Greeks referred to this kind of silent, invisible heart-based communication as aesthesis, which means “to breathe in.”
Heart-Based Hospitality incorporates heart-based perception and communication into the guest experience to provide new levels of hospitality. By means of heart-based perception, hotel staff can feel intuitively and energetically how a guest feels and what his needs are at any moment. Anyone can develop heart-based perception, and Heart-Based Hospitality provides various tools to develop it.
2. The Heart and Energy Fields
The heart, which holds the title as the organ with the most powerful electromagnetic field in the body, can sense the heart of another individual up to 4 metres away. Since the brain is highly sensitive to the reactions of the heart, it is able to pick up this kind of electromagnetic “heart sensing” and essentially alter the brain waves of another individual, as well as themselves, and/or actually synchronize their brainwaves with the other person’s.
Most of us have met a person whose presence, for no apparent reason, caused a sense of discomfort – whether it was sadness, anger, anxiety, or any other uneasy feeling – that warranted the decision to not forge a deeper connection with them. Just as we may not know why we felt this way around them, as they said all the right words and presented themselves in a “socially acceptable” way, we often may not pick up on the fact that this is occurring because of the other person’s energy and it is, in reality, not personal at all.
In this way, the electromagnetism of the heart greatly shapes our relationships, guiding us by what seems to be an almost effortless gravitation to connect with the heart fields of some people who then become friends and/or romantic partners, and steering us away from people whose heart energies clash with our own.
We know that the heart emits electromagnetic energy. Research carried out by HeartMath has shown that this energy carries messages and information into a field environment that is shared by and connects everyone. It is because of this, that hotel staff can be shown how to apply the knowledge in order to change the vibration of guest rooms, facilities, and the hotel as a whole so that they feel more pleasant to be in; and also in order to increase the feelings of wellbeing, contentment, and peace of the guests.
As you watch the following video, please consider the possibilities this knowledge offers for hospitality.
The Love Study
On a bright spring day, Schlitz is leading Teena and J.D. Miller down a path to the laboratory at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, north of San Francisco. Schlitz is the president of the institute, which conducts research on consciousness and spirituality. The Millers have been married a decade and their affection is palpable — making them perfect for the so-called Love Study.
J.D. and Teena Miller, who have been married for a decade, took part in the “Love Study” at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Schlitz takes Teena into an isolated room, where no sound can come in or go out. Teena settles into a deep armchair as Schlitz attaches electrodes to her right hand.
“This is measuring blood flow in your thumb, and this is your skin conductance activity,” the researcher explains. “So basically, both of these are measures of your unconscious nervous system.”
Schlitz locks Teena into the electromagnetically shielded chamber, then ushers J.D. into another isolated room with a closed-circuit television. She explains that the screen will go on and off. And at random intervals, Teena’s image will appear on the screen for 10 seconds.
“And so during the times when you see her,” she instructs, “it’s your opportunity to think about sending loving, compassionate intention.”
As the session begins, Dean Radin, a senior scientist here, watches as a computer shows changes in J.D.’s blood pressure and perspiration. When J.D. sees the image of his wife, the steady lines suddenly jump and become ragged. The question is: Will Teena’s nervous system follow suit?
“Notice how here … see, there’s a change in the blood volume,” says Radin, pointing to a screen charting Teena’s measurements. “A sudden change like that is sometimes associated with an orienting response. If you suddenly hear somebody whispering in your ear, and there’s nobody around, you have this sense of what? What was that? That’s more or less what we’re seeing in the physiology.”
An hour later, Radin displays Teena’s graph, which shows a flat line during the times her husband was not staring at her image, but when her husband began to stare at her, she stopped relaxing and became “aroused” within about two seconds.
After running 36 couples through this test, the researchers found that when one person focused his thoughts on his partner, the partner’s blood flow and perspiration dramatically changed within two seconds. The odds of this happening by chance were 1 in 11,000. Three dozen double blind, randomized studies by such institutions as the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh have reported similar results.
Developing the Potential and Discovering the Possibilities of Heart-Based Hospitality
While I know in my heart that the hotel industry globally will inevitably abandon its infatuation with the ever so limited concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction and change wholeheartedly to Heart-Based Hospitality, I feel sad that it will take many years for the change to come about; sad because mankind will be stuck with the current, global concept of hospitality for many more years to come in spite of growing awareness that there is something wrong with it.
Heart-Based Hospitality is not a fancy name for another corporate customer service training programme. It is a completely new direction in hospitality – one which is aligned with the spiritual essence of hospitality; with our spiritual nature; with the discoveries about the energetic nature of the human heart; with the discoveries in the quantum energy sciences about the energetic nature of the universe and human beings; with the texts of mankind’s main religious traditions; and with the wisdom of ancient cultures in Tibet, the Andes, Egypt, etc. In contrast, SOP-Customer Satisfaction is a left brain, corporate construct, which serves the efficiency and expansion needs of hotel groups according to a mass production-oriented corporate template.
The more I explore the possibilities of Heart-Based Hospitality, the more I realise how little I have scratched the surface of what is possible, and that I probably never will do more than scratch the surface. As more scientific research is carried out into heart energy, we learn more ways to open the heart; to increase the vibration of the energy emitted by the heart; and to affect the energy of spaces and the feelings of people in beautiful ways. As more is learned about how ancient cultures worked with energy; and as more is learned about the energetic nature of the universe, more ways appear in which hoteliers can change the feeling of the hospitality provided. Compared to the beautiful future of hospitality, we are living in very dark days.
While SOP-Customer Satisfaction has a ceiling in 100% conformity to the SOPs, there is no ceiling to Heart-Based Hospitality. There is no limit to how warm, caring, compassionate, and loving hospitality can become. The more you develop the spiritual capacity of the hotel staff; the more you open their heart; the more you deepen them in the essential core values of genuine hospitality; the more you develop the powers of their heart; and the more you heal their heart; the more intensely loving they can become.
I have created the direction, but it needs others to get involved in order to develop its potential. What I dread, though, is that a hotel group corporate office will adopt it and turn it into another version of SOP-Customer Satisfaction like what happened with the concept of “Creating Truly Memorable Experiences” (CTME), a concept whose spiritual essence was divested by corporate offices around the world.
When I look back at CTME I realise how limited that concept is. Heart-Based Hospitality, though, takes hospitality so much further by opening the door to an infinite number of levels or degrees of hospitality. But love and energy have yet to become acceptable words in corporate offices, and most probably they will not be acceptable for many years to come. I think it will take 15+ years before corporate hoteliers will dare to use these words in their board rooms and strategies. At the moment, there is not even a listening ear.
Mr. Hoplamazian seems to have realised that generally speaking in the hotel industry, hospitality has lost its way, and he is trying to restore it to its essence. But in its essential form, hospitality is a spiritual path trodden with practical feet, and whose adornment are the spiritual core values of Loving Kindness, Compassion, and the Heart-warming Care, which stems from love for fellow human beings.Empathy is not the way to restore hospitality to its essence. It is better than what the industry is providing, but it is far from providing the key, which are the essential core values of genuine hospitality and which are based in Love. But Love is not a corporate concept as yet, unfortunately, so nothing can be done.
Empathy is merely one aspect of Care, but Empathy has been diluted out of hospitality by the obsolete concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction, which prevails throughout the hotel industry. Mr. Hoplamazian has simply picked out one aspect of Care, which should have been focused on by every hotel group for many decades, but which hasn’t been. In that respect, he is blazing a new path, but that path is not the Holy Grail of hospitality. It is merely a small, minor path, which leads in the general direction of what Socrates would probably call the Ideal of Hospitality.
If he really wants to guide Hyatt and the hotel industry towards genuine hospitality, then he will have to change the focus to Love and Compassion, not merely to Empathy / Understanding.
Love is what is missing in hospitality nowadays, and while Compassion is rooted in Love, Empathy is not.
However, to create a concept of hospitality in his hotel group, which is rooted in Love, he will have to turn to the ancient knowledge of spirituality for help, and to learn how to use and change energy. But Spirituality and Energy are not corporate concepts as yet, unfortunately, so nothing can be done.
Nevertheless, at least Mr.Hoplamazian is raising awareness that hospitality has lost its way. Empathy is a good start. One day, the hotel industry will discover the business benefits of creating hospitality with Spirituality and Energy, and hospitality will gradually be restored to its essence. The hotel and wellness industries will then be transformed, and they will have a new role in service to mankind.
The Problem with Current Trends in the Hotel Industry
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?”
“The Next Big Thing” According to Some Hotel Group CEOs
No disrespect intended, but hotel group CEOs are missing the irony of their prophecies about the “Next Big Thing”.
They are all looking outwards for physical, tangible things – things which they can buy – and which they think or hope will change the hospitality experience. They have worked through more than one repeat-cycle of “the Next Big Thing” – the beds, the room amenities, the designs, the brand, the local experience, and technology. Now technology is back once again to being the “Next Big Thing”.
The irony is that the revolution in hospitality will not come from something tangible. Indeed, what will create the revolution is closer to the CEO than his life’s vein; and closer to him than his laptop screen. It lies in the use of (human) energy – heart energy, thought energy, consciousness, and spirituality (loving kindness, compassion, and the resulting heart-warming care).
The revolution will come from something invisible, (but measurable with scientific equipment, I should add) and heart-based; from something which you have to go inside to discover, but it extends outwards from you energetically. But they cannot understand this.
Indeed, if you are working inside the mechanistic Newtonian worldview as opposed to the energetic and spiritual Quantum worldview, which replaced it in 1925, then this is all you can understand and accept.
Who would dare to stand up in a corporate Board Room and say, “I think that we should focus on energy, spirituality, and consciousness to increase our share value.” The person would become the laughing stock in the C-Suites, and lose his chance to climb the ladder to Corporate Heaven.
Yet, this is the knowledge found in ancient cultures and traditions, monasteries in Tibet, the Andes, and Egypt, and in mainstream religious texts; and verified by quantum science and the energy sciences, which the CEOs are completely unaware of, and which will revolutionise hospitality.
I think that this direction will remain undiscovered by the hotel corporate folks for at least 10 years, possibly for longer. So, until then, the cycle of “the Next Big Thing” will repeat itself again and again. It is so frustrating to watch them.
Judging a CEO’s Legacy
When a hotel group CEO leaves a hotel company, the tendency nowadays is to measure a CEO’s legacy essentially by how much bigger he made the company in size, and by how much the share value rose. Should we not also be judging the CEO’s legacy by asking how much the CEO made the company serve mankind more; and how much he revolutionised the hospitality experience in a way that has changed people’s lives? I don’t think that simply making the share value rise by (5)% and increasing the hotel group’s size by (8)% is enough to talk meaningfully about the CEO’s legacy.
When judging the CEO’s legacy, should we not also ask, if the hotel group, as a result of his tenure, transformed the hospitality experienced by the guests? By this I am referring to the emotional and energetic aspect of the guest experience, and not to whether he implemented greater use of technology.
Did he upgrade the worldview of the hotel group to the Quantum worldview so that hospitality could rise to levels far above what is considered possible with the current, obsolete Newtonian worldview? By this I mean, did he leave the hotel group rooted in the mechanical, emotionless SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience concept or did he realise that this concept has had its day and so he changed it?
Did he use scientific discoveries and ancient knowledge to revolutionise hospitality in his hotel group or did he merely follow the crowd and copy what every other hotel group is doing?
If the CEO did none of these, is his legacy one to be proud of?
The Phantom DNA Effect
A man called Dr. Vladimir Poponin conducted some experiments in the early 1990’s that are very relevant to the hotel industry. His finding is called “the DNA Phantom Effect”.
Before his work, science had already demonstrated that our emotions affect our DNA either positively or negatively, depending on the nature (vibration or energy) of our thoughts and emotions.
But what Dr. Poponin’s studies showed was that human DNA can and does directly affect the physical world. In other words, our thoughts and emotions affect the physical world according to the energy or vibration of the thoughts and emotions. Loving thoughts have a high, positive vibration.
The experiments began when patterns of light (or energy) in a vacuum were measured in a controlled environment. All of the air was removed and the light particles (or photons) followed a random distribution. Dr. Poponin then introduced a physical chain of human DNA. In the presence of the human DNA the photons changed positions from a random distribution to a pattern of a wave that aligned with the DNA. The DNA clearly affected the energy of the photons. That was the first surprise.
The next surprise came when they removed the DNA from the chamber. It was expected that the photons would return to the random distribution. But the photons stayed in the wave position created from the introduction of the DNA. As the study continued, so long as the vacuum was not disturbed the photons stayed in the wave position for as long as a month after the DNA was removed. The human DNA affected the energy even when it was no longer there!
Science has now proven that our DNA can affect energy and the world around us. Isn’t that how Energy Healing, Reiki and Prayer work? Science is finally starting to prove what many of us believed all along.
Now, if your thoughts and emotions can affect your DNA and your DNA can affect all of the energy and the area around you, what kind of guest experience, spirit, and energy could hotel staff actually create when they are close to guests or just throughout the hotel area, if they focused their energy on loving kindness, heart-warming care, compassion, and empathy? Heart-Based hospitality not only strengthens this focus continuously, but it also raises the vibration of the body’s heart energy field so that the DNA of the staff can exert a high vibration on their immediate environment and surrounding area.
You can begin to see the vast difference between the pervasive SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience, which you find throughout the global hotel industry, and Heart-Based Hospitality. SOP-Customer Satisfaction tends to dull the emotions of hotel staff and to create a flat-feeling guest experience because the staff are focused on performing their job skills. Their thoughts and emotions are affecting their DNA, which in turn is imprinting a dull vibration throughout the hotel. Heart-Based Hospitality in contrast raises the vibration of the staff by focusing on loving kindness, compassion, heart-warming care and empathy, with the result that the DNA of the staff imprints a much higher vibration in guest interactions and in the physical area of the hotel.
The implications of experiments, such as the Phantom DNA Effect, are far-reaching for the hospitality industry, but is there a listening ear while the drums in the corridors of corporate offices beat the monotonous rhythm of SOP-Customer Satisfaction?
The Passion of the Big Chains for Boutique and Independent Hotels
Hilton has announced Tapestry Collection as its newest brand. It is envisaged to be a brand of boutique-style hotels. All of the big chains have now created new brands for boutique-style or independent hotels or have taken over an existing group of such hotels.
The big chains obviously understand that guests are preferring more and more to stay in individually designed and operated hotels rather than in the branded hotels, which are clones of a fairly emotionless, efficiency-oriented, corporate template.
It is fair to say, I think, that the big hotel groups know they have a serious problem with the hospitality concept of their main corporate brand, which can no longer be concealed. As a result, they are creating new brands around independent hotels and boutique hotels, which are not bound by a mechanistic concept of hospitality. They seem to sense, at last, that the future of hotel hospitality does not lie with the cloning of an old-style, mechanistic, corporate template.
However, by creating a boutique brand, they will most probably be using the same corporate templates to create it, which they use to create the main corporate brand, which is losing its appeal. As they expand, the new boutique brands will then become corporate in nature and they will lose their appeal, thereby leaving the big hotel group corporate office folks back at square one.
They only have one way out of this, and that is to turn all their brands into energetic, spiritual, consciousness-oriented, and Heart-Based hospitality brands. It is pointless to fight it. The death of the mechanistic, corporate hospitality concept is inevitable. The Age of Cloning will then be over, and the spirit and energetic feeling of every hotel will be different. The energetic feeling will become the yardstick. Hotels will then be able to become places of healing and able to meet the emerging emotional, wellbeing, energetic, and healing needs of human beings.
But the corporate offices will resist this option and direction because it will involve so much change. Every SOP will have to be rewritten. Their worldview will have to change. Love, kindness, and compassion will have to become the new focus of hospitality, which they should be anyway, but “love”, “energy”, and “spirituality” are not respectable corporate words.
The sooner the corporate offices can accept that going inwards is the future of hospitality, the sooner hotels can move on to become places of healing, which is their destiny.
A Revolution, Which the Hotel Industry “Visionaries” Cannot See Coming
There is a significant wind of change blowing, which seems to have blindsided all the hotel industry visionaries and gurus, namely the demise of the current guest experience concept called SOP-Customer Satisfaction, and its replacement with energetic Heart-Based hospitality.
In my opinion the whole hotel industry is looking in the wrong direction for the Next Big Thing because everyone is copying each other’s thinking about the contribution of technology, mobile devices, and software.
Everyone is focused outwards on material things in order to find the Next Big Thing, but ironically it is closer to us than one’s life vein. The Next Big Thing is inside us, but corporate people cannot see this because it is not fashionable, politically correct, or even corporately respectable enough to look for it inside.
The revolution in the hotel industry will come when hoteliers apply ancient wisdom about energy, and scientific research into energy and the power of the heart-brain, in order to create the guest experience, and stop copying the obsolete guest experience paradigm and concept of the big hotel chains, which is based on the obsolete, 17th century Newtonian worldview. The revolution will come when hospitality is allowed to return to its spiritual origin and essence, which is in loving kindness, compassion, and genuinely heart-warming care. Unconditional love has been booted out of hospitality by the money- and shareholder-oriented model.
The whole discussion about OTAs vs Chain Hotels will change dramatically as a result of the revolution because the intransigent, big chain hotels will decline while the flexible, small hotel groups and independent hotels will dominate the industry. But nobody can see this revolution coming, not even the gurus and visionaries. Even if they could, would they dare to say something so politically incorrect at a major hotel conference attended by representatives of the big chains? They would surely be banned from speaking ever again at the big conferences. Their “guru” credentials might even be cancelled.
The hotel industry is going to be transformed when the guest experience concept is changed from the old-style, emotionless, mechanical, shareholder-oriented approach of SOP-Customer Satisfaction. This is going to be a huge disruptor and it will lead to massive change in the hotel industry.
Hoteliers know that something is wrong with the guest experience, and every effort to find a solution with material means is failing. Hoteliers will not be able to solve the problem with the same kind of thinking, which caused it in the first place. Change is coming in a big way, but The Emperor’s New Clothes paradigm prevails. Who will be the first visionary or guru to dare to point this out?
Life in the Value-Dry Rut of Tradition
When you are a dweller in the deep Rut of Tradition, you can only see things in the same way as all the other Rut dwellers. A CEO should surround himself with people who come from outside the Rut in the Land of Opportunity.
I think that just about every CEO is in the same situation, but if you tell them that if they climb out of the Rut of Tradition, they will discover the colourful and creative Land of Opportunity with the solutions to their problems, they won’t give you the time of day. I know because I have written to about 60 CEOs who find themselves on the CEO Merry-Go-Round.
It does not matter where you look inside the Rut, you will not find the new ideas and concepts, which will add transform hospitality. The day will come when either the CEO is replaced because the Board feels that he did not add enough value, or when the hotel group is bought up by another hotel group, which believes in the old Rut idea that bigger is better.
Rut dwellers cannot see that all the possible value has been squeezed out of the SOP-Customer Satisfaction concept already. It is bone-dry and fit for the fire because it does not meet the emotional, spiritual, energetic, and wellness needs of human beings. Trying to resuscitate it with technology, designs, by looking to the Millennials as the Saviour, by increasing efficiency in the SOPs, and other suchlike Rut ideas is pointless. But where is there a listening ear?
If CEOs want to add value, they will find it in energy, consciousness, and the power of love – in the energetic guest experience. Until then, the CEO Merry-Go-Round will continue to revolve, stopping regularly to change the riders.
The Technology Rat Race
It is an unnecessary and pointless rat race to get involved in. Hotels will never be able to upgrade to the latest technology for obvious reasons. It is like trying to satisfy Imelda Marcos’ infamous thirst for shoes. Material things will never make the guests happy, even if you fill each room with every latest technology.
The Holy Grail of the guest experience will not be found in technology and in the thinking characteristic of the Newtonian worldview.
It will be found by going inside – by developing the spiritual capacity of the staff, and by showing them how to work with thought energy, heart energy, and other energies to create a guest experience, which feels incredible and which fulfills the guests’ dreams. Copying Marriott and such groups will take hotels lemming-like in the wrong direction, even if saying this is so politically incorrect.
We are energy beings who respond to energies, such as the energy of loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. That is the area to focus on, and the investment is tiny.
Creating More and More Brands Will Not Solve the Hospitality Problem
Hotel corporate offices know that there is something wrong with their guest experience. They know that something is missing from their core brand. But creating new brands will not solve the problem because they are creating those new brands with the same thinking and hospitality concept, which caused the problem in the first place.
The hospitality problem will persist as long as the hotel industry remains entrenched in the obsolete Newtonian worldview; refuses to allow love back into hospitality; continues to deny the existence of energy and the benefits of heart energy; persists with a guest experience concept which is at odds with human nature and the heart; ignores the discoveries of science and ancient wisdom; and refuses to upgrade itself to the Quantum worldview.
Executive Boards have spent their whole careers enmeshed in current, old-style thinking, and the same level of thinking will not solve their problems. But try to tell them that and they will pay no attention. I know this from experience.
Until Executive Boards make love, energy, and consciousness a part of their strategic planning, nothing will change except that there will be more same-same brands based on the same ideas, and which will not change the nature of the guest experience or create an emotional connection with the heart because their guest experience concept and paradigms are rooted in the same Rut of Tradition thinking.
Science has shown how we can influence people and the world around us through the power of our heart and our thoughts, feelings, and emotions; how our emotions can change the energetic feeling of a room or area, and even reduce murders and accidents in a city by 25% in a day; how sending love energy to an object for long enough will change the feeling of a room it is placed in; how creating feelings of love can make crops grow far better than chemicals can; how we can heal people over great distances by sending love and healing energy to them; how we can cure cancer in minutes even; etc., etc.
But the hotel industry refuses to wake up to the power of love, energy, and the heart. When it does, the “what’s missing from hospitality?” problem will be solved. Until then hoteliers will just have to live with the headaches. But, it is a respectable and politically correct headache, which is shared by many people in corporate offices.
Each Individual Impacts the Field Environment
The heart produces the body’s electromagnetic energy field. Heart-Based hospitality changes the energy of the guest experience by working on the body’s heart energy.
Each individual’s thoughts, attitudes and emotions emit energetic fields, and this is very relevant to the hotel industry, even though it is ignored. These individual field environments not only affect you, your health, and your perspective on life, but they can also influence your relationships and experiences in your social and hotel field environments as you interact with guests, colleagues, customers, and friends. Can hotel staff change their individual and social field environments so that they make guests feel warm, genuinely cared for, and happy around them? Yes, they can.
Attitudes of coherent genuine love, appreciation, care, and compassion change a field environment – both locally, such as in a meeting or a hotel you are in – and even throughout the world as we are all connected to the planet’s energy field. These spiritual qualities create high frequency, warm-feeling energy field environments. Through various means Heart-Based hospitality increases the heart’s coherence in order to create these warm-feeling, high frequency field environments in the staff and throughout the hotel.
Coherence is a highly efficient state in which all of the body’s systems work together in harmony. Increasing personal coherence creates an alignment of mind, body, emotions and spirit through the power of the heart. Heart coherence serves as a facilitator, adding strength and effectiveness to one’s loving care, compassion, intentions, and actions to others, particularly to the guests.
The electromagnetic field generated by the heart is the most powerful rhythmic energy field produced by the body. Studies by the HeartMath Institute have shown that the heart’s electromagnetic field can be detected by other individuals and can produce measurable effects in a person 5 feet away. You will be able to see the relevance here for guest service. The Institute’s data shows that the heart’s electromagnetic field becomes more organized during positive emotional (heart-coherent) states.
The Individual Field Environment
Sometimes we wake up in the morning and our energy field is sunny-side-up and bubbly. Then our pitch drops after a few bumpy interactions, such as you spill your coffee; you can’t find your keys; you are late for work; and so on. Such frustrations often magnetize more negative thoughts, insecurity and anxiety, leaving you more vulnerable to emotional overload, impossible time crunches, and personal energy drain. You can reset the pitch of your individual field environment in a variety of ways, such as by doing the following:
Stop, relax a few minutes, while imagining yourself breathing the attitude of neutral (or love for someone or a place) in through your heart or chest area. This quiets the energy of frustration and anxiety. Then you can re-center yourself in the heart and replace the negative field environment with a positive attitude and outlook. Then tell yourself, “You’re back in charge now.” It’s important to learn to shift your pitch in the field environment when you find yourself in the “drain mode.”
Social Field Environment
A restaurant, a function room, a business meeting, and social gatherings are examples of social field environments. When you hear someone say, “You could cut the tension in the room with a knife,” in essence, this is referring to a turbulent energy field environment. Lively discussions in business meetings that spiral down into arguments can leave people in the room feeling, “Why even be in here? What a waste of my precious time,” etc. Similarly, when staff are uncaring, the guests may feel their unpleasant energy and wish to leave the hotel.
In contrast, you have also probably been in places with people communicating from their heart space and heard comments that the energy in the room (field environment) was upbeat, heart-based, and inspired creative interaction and solutions. The people felt refreshed and energized by the positive energy field environment. Similarly, in a hotel, when staff are genuinely warm and caring, and their heart rhythm is coherent, the guests will probably feel their high frequency energy and enjoy their stay at the hotel more.
The collective energy in a room (or area, such as a hotel) makes up the social energy field environment, which vibrates at a certain pitch. The overall room pitch (or vibration), is based on the collective pitch of the individuals in the room. Often when a few individuals take the initiative, they can change the collective room vibration by increasing their own vibration. This can be done by radiating the attitude of peace or love, and flow into the field environment while doing deep heart listening, with the intent remaining neutral and without judgment. Then sharing from the heart becomes easier and more objective without the negative energy that brings down the collective field environment. Though we cannot help it at times, judgments and criticisms are in most cases, responsible for bringing down the pitch in communication field-environments (meetings or personal communications).
The collective energy of hotel staff can create a positive or negative vibration according to the service concept, leadership style, and/or training programmes.
Indeed, it is common for hotels where the guest experience concept is SOP-Customer Satisfaction to have a vibration that feels flat. But the collective vibration can be changed in a variety of ways, and this is what Heart-Based hospitality does.
Hotel Energy Field Environment
The hotel field environment encompasses all of the hotel’s employees and guests. Much of it is made up of the collective consciousness of all the people in it. Radiating love into the hotel energy field environment increases the positive energy, making it easier for the hotel and its inhabitants (employees and guests) to shift and transmute the accumulated negative energy. Even sending two minutes of loving care a day to the hotel environment can make a big difference.
It also helps to take some time to envision the hotel the way you want it to be, because thoughts and imagination precede the creation and manifestation of what we are trying to obtain. (Be it a house, car, relationship, vacation, etc.) Besides caring more for the hotel, another major facet is realizing the need to be more responsible for our own energy, thoughts, feelings and actions. This especially will upgrade our personal and the hotel’s energy field environment.
Remember, we are always creating an effective or ineffective field environment with whatever thoughts, feelings and attitudes we are experiencing or putting out. Heart-Based hospitality involves consciously effecting positive change in the staff’s personal and the hotel’s energy field environments. The resulting positive field environment will have a higher vibration, will multiply the potential of the guests and employees to experience a more balanced and joyful life, and the guest experience will make the guests feel happier.