The future of the hotel guest experience does not lie with the current, pervasive concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction. This will fade away along with its proponents, if they do not change, because it is a poor reflection of what is easily possible. The guest experience of the future will be energetic in nature and created by means of thought energy and heart energy, and hotels will compete on the basis of how well they create the energy. I call the energetic guest experience Heart-Based Hospitality.
The heart produces an electromagnetic energy field, which extends about 3 metres around the body. It extends much further, but machines can only measure it this far. People who see energy say it may extend 20 metres all around us. Knowing how to change this energy field and the energy emitted from the heart is the key to creating Heart-Based Hospitality, and knowing how to change the energy will be vital in attracting business in the future. Heart energy is the key to creating a Heart-Based Hospitality guest experience, which is soft, gentle, and strong in loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care.
In contrast, the old-style SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience is based on a left brain, mechanical approach to hospitality. As a result, it lacks the high frequency energy, which comes from loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care, and it produces in the staff and the hotel a much lower frequency of energy, which feels flat.
If hotels and hotel groups want to create a guest experience which is strong in high frequency energy, they must stop copying the big western hotel chains, which perpetuate the old-style SOP-Customer Satisfaction concept. Change and progress in the hotel industry will not come by copying their traditional ideas and methods, but hotels continue to copy them blindly.
As a result, hospitality has become so westernized and its essential emotion-filled components of loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care have faded. These have been replaced by emotionless SOP manuals, emotionless policies and procedures about how to care for guests, and emotionless technology. Love has been sent on a permanent vacation, and hospitality has been downgraded to an almost robotic experience that focuses on satisfying guests according to emotionless SOPs. Hospitality without its essence of genuine loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care is like a meadow or tree deprived of water.
Here is a common scenario in opening hotels. The Department Heads are given or create emotionless SOP manuals, which are usually a mixture of western hotel group manuals. The Team Leaders train the SOPs and the staff carry them out. The Training Manager supports the process by carrying out corporate Customer Satisfaction workshops, which reinforce the left brain-oriented guest experience. In principle, this sounds fine. The guest experience is orderly, efficient, organized, very corporate, and squeaky-clean. But from an emotional and energetic point of view the guest experience is very flat. Why?
Firstly, hoteliers must understand that thoughts are energy and that the frequency of the thought energy affects the energy produced by the heart. The frequency of the energy also affects the energy of the body’s electromagnetic energy field and the vibrations that it sends out into the hotel environment. The SOP-Customer Satisfaction concept creates in the staff a lot of low frequency heart energy because it is a rational, left brain concept. The body’s energy field reflects this low frequency energy and sends it out.
Not only do the staff members feel emotionally flat, but also the energy emitted by the heart into the hotel environment and towards the guests feels flat and emotionally weak. You cannot expect SOP-Customer Satisfaction to feel different. This is why SOP-Customer Satisfaction (chain) hotels often
feel energetically flat.
In contrast Heart-Based Hospitality feels very different. Also it is created in a very different way. You create it by opening the heart. SOP-Customer Satisfaction does not open the heart. What does “opening the heart” mean? Think of your heart as being like a dam with a huge reservoir behind it. Beside of the dam there are some sluice gates, which when open, release a small amount of water. The heart of hotel staff is similar to a dam. For the sake of this analogy replace the water with love. Because staff are so focused on carrying out emotionless SOPs, the gates are barely open and so there is very little love flowing out from the heart.
In Heart-Based Hospitality though, when a member of staff opens their heart, they open all of the sluice gates as wide as they will open, and just let the love flow out with full force without asking if too much is coming out. This is how hospitality is meant to be! There is no limit to the amount of love stored behind the dam. When the person does this, they become their true selves, they feel so much happier, and they become more beautiful.
In addition, the person’s energy field becomes filled with high frequency energy. The heart’s rhythm becomes coherent and emits waves of positive-feeling, high frequency energy, which changes the energy, spirit, and feel of the guest experience and of the hotel. You can even measure this energy.
What hotel corporate offices have to learn is how to open the hearts of their staff. But when they work it out they will discover that this is not enough to create Heart-Based Hospitality because their hotels are organized perfectly to support the obsolete SOP-Customer Satisfaction concept. Their internal supporting systems stand in stark contrast to those required to support and develop Heart-Based Hospitality. Heart-Based Hospitality cannot be created with current systems and methods because those are perfect for creating the SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience. Personally, I do not foresee the big chains changing them, and their internal organization will be their Nemesis.
Because Heart-Based Hospitality will become pervasive globally, hotel groups which do not adapt and change their internal organization, will find it hard to attract business. Why should people stay at a western chain hotel, for example, which offers a standard, SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience when other hotels offer a soft, Heart-Based guest experience, which is strong in loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care, in equally attractive rooms and for a similar or even lower price?
I know that the big chains will dismiss this with, “Don’t you know who we are?” But that’s up to them. Once one or two groups change, others will follow quickly. Those that believe they do not need to change will surely suffer the same fate as countless similar-thinking companies and CEOs that litter the annals of “has-beens” and “also-rans”. Nowadays, it does not matter how big or famous you are. Your shareholders will leave you as fast as you can say, “Enron, Lehmann Brothers, Chrysler, and Worldcom”, if they feel that the winds of change are blowing in a different direction. Then your market-leading hotel group will become another relic in the Museum of Hospitality.
In short, to create Heart-Based Hospitality hoteliers must study heart energy research and quantum science. They must understand that:
1. Everything is made of vibrating energy. This includes buildings, plants, animals, and human beings.
2. The body produces an electromagnetic energy field, which is created mainly by the heart, not the brain. Understanding and applying this will open up a huge source of revenue for you and safeguard your hotel’s or hotel group’s future.
3. Everything is connected to everything else. Everybody is connected to everyone else. Everybody’s energy field is connected. This is fundamental when creating Heart-Based Hospitality.
4. Our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and emotions impact the world around us according to the vibration of the energy. You can even increase crop yields with thought and heart energy. Heart-Based Hospitality methods pay particular attention to increasing the frequency and feel of the energy. Hotels must learn how to open the hearts of their staff.
5. The internal organization must be changed to support the energetic guest experience.
Modern science is showing that when we practise heart-based living, not only are there changes inside our body, but there are also changes outside our bodies. The world around us is primarily electrical and magnetic. Hotels can use this to their advantage by reducing the almost total focus on the left side of the brain caused by the over-emphasis on SOP-Customer Satisfaction training and systems, and by spending more time developing their staff’s capacity to show loving-kindness, compassion, heart-warming care in their service. It is very easy.
Small to medium-sized hotel groups may not realize it, but now is their time. I feel sure that the big hotel groups will not change in time because they are just too big and too fixed in their ways. If small to medium-sized hotel groups create a Heart-Based Hospitality guest experience with the supporting systems, they can and will take a large market share from the big chains.
Hospitality should not be about respectability and correctness. It should be about love, compassion, and intense spiritual warmth so that “… as from a bed of flowers … sweet scents be shed.” The smile will then bring fragrance to the soul, and not be forced. Where is there a hotel group that has this as its corporate-driven goal?
The guest experience should be based on a concept of hospitality that is spiritual in nature, such as in the following quotation, and then infused in practical ways into every SOP:
“Be kind to all peoples; care for every person; do all ye can to purify the hearts and minds of men; strive ye to gladden every soul. To every meadow be a shower of grace, to every tree the water of life; be as sweet musk to the sense of humankind, and to the ailing be a fresh, restoring breeze. Be pleasing waters to all those who thirst, a careful guide to all who have lost their way; be father and mother to the orphan, be loving sons and daughters to the old, be an abundant treasure to the poor.” Baha’i Writings
The essential spirit of hospitality is like smelling the most beautiful perfume in the world. It should create the feelings, which orphans experience when they get loving parents for the first time. It should be like a refreshing, cool breeze on a hot day. It should leave its footprints in the heart of every guest.
Of course, SOPs are important, but they should be infused with the spirit above. Staying in a hotel should be a spiritually uplifting and heart-warming experience. We are spiritual beings. Heart-Based Hospitality is about creating a hotel that is an oasis of loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care; a place where guests say, “I’ve never experienced such heart-warming care and compassion.”; which fulfills the dreams of the guests; and which makes them feel like they would ideally like to feel. It is so easy to create this. A medium-sized hotel group could create it in one year, which means that in one year your hotel group or hotel could become backwater.
The concept of hospitality in the future will be heart-based, energetic, and spiritual in nature. There is no other direction to go in. For sure, many will deny that they need to change, and soon they will find themselves the object of conversation about former hotels and hotel groups. Creating Heart-Based Hospitality will be very good for business because people are silently crying out for an experience that is strong in loving-kindness, compassion, heart-warming care, and intense spiritual warmth.
If you build it, they will come.
