Introduction
The pervasive hotel industry concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction does not create authentic hospitality. It creates a largely mechanical and emotionless, but efficient guest experience, which not only makes it difficult for staff to be their true self, but it also does not meet the emotional, spiritual, energetic, and healing needs of human beings. The concept’s inability to meet those needs is its Achilles Heel and why its upholders can expect to be affected financially unless they adapt soon and quickly.
Authentic hospitality is provided when the guest experience is rooted in and exudes the essence of hospitality, namely, loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. These are the timeless values held uppermost in religious traditions going back thousands of years. The hotel’s material aspects, the brand and its standards and systems, the technology, lifestyle and design concept, and suchlike are secondary to this essence. Unfortunately, hotel groups and hotels generally have mistaken the secondary aspects for the essence.
Love for fellow human beings is the essence of authentic hospitality, and hospitality void of a focus on love is merely a hollow, materialistic activity. I realize that this thinking is out of sync with the shareholder-oriented model, but the current concept and paradigm about hospitality cannot last because it does not conform to timeless values. Indeed, the cracks are already very clearly visible.
Even modern science understands the importance of love. To give an idea of how wayward from authentic hospitality the pervasive guest experience concept has strayed, scientists are now creating a Theory of Consciousness connected to love because they have discovered (and agree on) that consciousness (which is essentially the energy of love) fills the atoms of everything and the cells of all living things in the universe.
Moreover, scientists have proved that sending thoughts of love, healing intent, prayer, good intention, and other units of consciousness can have a powerful influence on what you are directing those feelings towards, and indeed create reality. However, where is there a hotel corporate office, which has included “love” in its mission or vision statement or used the word in its marketing material?
In other words, science and religion are now saying the same things about love in each other’s own language. But the hotel industry is stuck in the Rut of Tradition in a low energy vibration, mechanical, and emotionless approach to creating the guest experience, and is ignoring the science and the knowledge of ancient cultures and religious traditions, which all state that love is the essence, that everything is made of energy, and that you can influence this energy positively with loving thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Knowing how to use, change, send, and condition energy to raise the energetic vibration of the guest experience without limit is the Holy Grail for creating a guest experience far above the artificial ceiling of 5 Stars. The hotel industry should feel embarrassed that it considers 5 Stars and SOP-Customer Satisfaction as the best that humanity can create. I call the energetic path to creating authentic hospitality Heart-Based Hospitality (HBH), but the name is unimportant.
A hotel group or hotel cannot start to create an authentic hospitality guest experience based on the energy of love without creating a completely new mission and vision statement. The SOP-Customer Satisfaction kind is totally unsuitable. One HBH hotel has made their mission (purpose): “To provide an unforgettable spirit of love to every guest and team member and to fulfill their unspoken dreams.” Another: “To create an oasis of happiness where the employees and guests feel truly cared for and understood.” By choosing this direction, the energy of the hotel can start to be transformed.
HBH hotels aim to create an experience, which is strong in the high vibration energy of loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care, and which exerts an emotional, spiritual, and energetic healing effect on the guests (and staff). This direction and purpose is the untrodden path. As the winds of change blow stronger the role of hotels will change to include healing energetically because this meets the spoken and unspoken needs of mankind.
The vision statements of HBH hotels invariably aim to create: “a loving and heart-warming home”, a haven where the guests experience loving-kindness, happiness, and peace in their heart”, a place “where they feel transformed by loving-kindness, compassion, and genuine care”, “a place where guests can feel peace in their heart, rejuvenated, and spiritually refreshed”, and “a sanctuary whose purpose is to make all guests and staff experience the love and happiness they dream about”.
HBH hotels work with energy to create a guest experience where the guests feel: “the staff understand my unspoken needs and wishes”, “spiritually recharged”, “transformed”, “inner peace”, “rejuvenated”, “a loving atmosphere”, “re-energized deeply inside”, “wonderfully happy feelings and energy”, “a special energy which they will never forget”, and where they have “never felt so cared for before”.
Compare this to the common SOP-Customer Satisfaction mission statements: “Our mission is to exceed the expectations of our customers and to achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction.” and, “We are one united team of dedicated hotel professionals committed to the achievement of guest satisfaction, high productivity, … and profitability.” One corporate mission statement even states that the group’s aim is “to redefine efficiency”. No wonder the energy vibration of SOP-Customer Satisfaction hotels can be abysmally low.
Creating authentic hospitality requires a continuous, daily, energetic process of opening the hearts of the staff. Helpful ways to do this are outlined below. As the heart opens more and more your energy vibration increases, your eyes and smile soften, and you become more beautiful. You become more loving, kind, compassionate, and caring. It happens naturally. You start to become your true self. You are not afraid to love deeply and to show loving-kindness and warmth anymore. You feel connected to the loving and joyful energy of the heart, and the energy of the heart flows easily. It feels easy to express and show love and compassion. As a Nur blessing states:
“The most beautiful eyes are those that see everything with love and compassion.”
Love guides your actions. When you show loving-kindness to others you have a feeling of softness, expansion, lightness, and a gentle happiness in your chest. You choose to express and experience more love in each moment. You are true to yourself, authentic, who you really are, and you are your real, loving self. You communicate with love. You think in kind ways, speak kind words, and you have a Heart-Based intention behind all your interactions with others. You are not afraid to let the energy of the heart flow.
Someone with an open heart usually feels happy, and their aura may fill an entire room with high frequency energy. But when you are sad, bored, or uninspired, your aura collapses in on you and sends out unpleasant, low frequency energy. The heart literally has an energetic effect on its surroundings, which can be felt, measured, and even photographed. Some people’s auras reach out and embrace you. Others make you want to stay away from them. This is very relevant to the
guest experience.
HBH hotels help staff in various energetic ways to open their heart, and the change can be photographed with the right equipment. One way is to teach the staff how to send love energy to guests, guest rooms, facilities, and to the whole hotel. Sending love energy creates in you the high vibration feelings of when you fall in love. The more you send it, the stronger the desire to make other people happy becomes.
When you send love energy a mass of energy can be photographed and even seen by clairvoyants leaving the heart Chakra, and it reaches the destination anywhere in the world within a second. The effect of sending thought energy was even demonstrated on the last Apollo flight to the Moon.
Leaders in HBH hotels include love energy meditations in their briefings. The meditations soften both them and their staff, and increase their desire to show loving-kindness, compassion, and care. The smile and the eyes change noticeably over time. I have seen how even unsmiling leaders, their staff, and the guest experience have been transformed by sending love energy often. Gradually, the staff just let themselves go and show loving-kindness and care naturally from the heart without asking, if it is too much. Their body language softens, their smiles become brighter, and their desire to please grows. The change is wonderful to see.
HBH hotels also change the energy of their staff by deepening them daily about the essential core values of authentic hospitality (loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care) during the briefing and staff development sessions. The sessions include heart-touching stories, and the staff exemplify the spirit of the stories in service-oriented role plays whose standard is the spirit and deep meanings of a quotation like this:
“Be kind to all peoples; care for every person; do all you can to purify the hearts and minds of men; strive 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
There are many other energetic ways to create (and to restore) the desire in the staff to let themselves go and to show loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care without having to be told. For example, there are some Tibetan-Buddhist visualization-meditations, which make one’s dormant desire to show compassion come alive. These can be included in a briefing.
Another invaluable energetic way to help staff to be their authentic self is to remove from their energy pathways the stress and energy, which are preventing them from being their true loving, kind selves. If you are stressed, it is difficult to provide authentic hospitality. The Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) are very effective in removing these energy blocks.
EFT also enables people to remove the energetic causes for being unable to show compassion and kindness to themselves. When you cannot show love, compassion, and kindness to yourself, it is hard to show these emotions to others.
Another element of creating authentic hospitality involves teaching the staff how to clean their body’s energy. They work in an environment where there are hundreds of people with different vibrations of energy. The energy in each person’s energy field and the energy of their thoughts, feelings, and emotions affect everyone around them. Any low frequency energy from people’s fears, worries, and stress, for example, will bring down your vibration and make it difficult for you to be loving, kind, compassionate, and caring, and to emit a high vibration. Because of this the staff in HBH hotels are taught different ways to clean their energy, such as using light energy visualizations, sound frequencies, and the sound “aum”, and by using nature, for example.
Cleaning your energy and using EFT help to restore the body’s natural, energetic balance, and when the balance is restored it is easier to be your authentic, loving self. Sound and visualizations can be used to restore the energy balance of the Chakras. These energy centres become misaligned, weak, or blocked easily, and as a result it is very difficult to be one’s true self, and to be loving, kind, compassionate, and caring, and to have a radiant smile from the heart.
HBH works on the energy of the staff in various energetic ways, and the energy and spirit of the guest experience is very different. The effect over time is that the staff and their guest experience soften and become more loving, kind, compassionate, and caring from the heart. Their smiles and eyes become brighter and very different to what you see in a typical hotel where the focus in briefings and training is on retraining and reminding the staff about the (corporate) SOPs. No wonder their staff have difficulty smiling from the heart.
Not only do briefings in HBH hotels serve to raise the vibration of the staff before they start work, but skills training sessions also serve this purpose. The SOPs are written and trained in a way that the staff carry them out at the level of the HBH mission and vision statements shown above. HBH hotels take typical SOP manuals and change every SOP to fit the spirit of HBH.
Leadership training supports HBH. The leaders are shown how to carry out their duties in ways, which enhance the spirit of HBH and create the feelings in the guests, which are stated in the mission and vision statement. They are shown how to deepen their staff in the core values; how to create the HBH spirit in the daily operation; and they also learn energy techniques, which help them to create a soft guest experience. To encourage them to do so, heart-touching and inspiring videos, songs, and music are used in the leadership development sessions.
In contrast to traditional, left-brain, training techniques, which create a mechanical approach to leadership and mechanical service, when you work through the heart the motivation for leaders becomes love and the nature of the guest experience becomes about loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care.
I have been told many times not to mention the word “love” in articles because it will turn off hoteliers, especially in corporate offices, to the possibilities of HBH; discourage them from abandoning the old concepts and paradigms; and rising above the traditional ceiling of 5 Stars. It reminds me of the hilarious John Cleese sketch, “The Germans”, in which he is told not to mention the War, but he keeps doing so by accident nonetheless
But how can I leave it out when the essence of authentic hospitality is love? The hotel industry will never be able to go beyond SOP-Customer Satisfaction’s 5 Stars level and create authentic hospitality at the uncountable levels above 5 Stars until it embraces fully the true essence of authentic hospitality, which is love.
The industry can continue to ignore this essence, but the time is coming when the public will demand an energetic guest experience, which is strong in loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. Hotels will have no choice but to adapt or go out of business. Can hoteliers not feel the change, which mankind is undergoing? Old-style ideas, approaches, and systems, which do not meet people’s emotional, spiritual, and energetic, healing needs are being abandoned, and the companies, which uphold them are disappearing or in the financial doldrums.
As soon as one hotel group changes to creating a HBH guest experience, it will send waves throughout the hotel industry and bring about the demise of the SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience. Hotel groups and hotels will be forced to change because the public will gravitate towards the hotels, which can provide energetic HBH, as it meets their emotional, spiritual, and energetic, healing needs.
So far I have looked at how the staff can use energy techniques to change their own energy, which in turn affects the energy of the hotel and the guest experience. But the spirit of authentic hospitality can be enhanced by changing the energy of the hotel in other ways, which similarly are measurable and photographable with the right equipment, such as a Gas Discharge Visualization camera.
For example, hotels can use energy pyramids to fill hotel areas with electro-magnetic energy from the planet’s energy field, just like the ancient Egyptians did. They can use pyramids to energize granite and place it around the hotel perimeter to create a calming environment; use salt to clear negative energy from guest rooms; and structure water used in cooking and for drinking to change people’s energy. Staff could even wear crystals to balance their own energy and to emit a higher vibration. These techniques increase the frequency of the energy they emit; they soften the staff; and increase the natural desire to show kindness and compassion.
Hoteliers may think that using energy is all nonsense, but the effect of such energy techniques has been proven and measured scientifically. Yes, SOP-Customer Satisfaction works, but it does not provide authentic hospitality. The hotel industry should not be afraid to recognize this and to move on to the levels above 5 Stars.
One day it will be normal for staff to fill their restaurant with high frequency love energy during a briefing; and for Housekeeping staff to send energy to the rooms they clean, both while in the room or during a briefing – or even from home, if they wish to do so. Sales and Marketing people will send energy to their clients to create good feelings in the client. Staff will condition the energy of guest rooms in a lasting way by sending daily for a few weeks a loving intention to an object, which is then placed in the guest room to raise its vibration. Staff will also remove their stress in minutes by means of energy techniques.
I understand that this energetic approach to hospitality is difficult for corporate offices and hoteliers hardened over the years by SOP-Customer Satisfaction to accept. They can choose to ignore this article, but they will not be able to ignore the winds of change. In the future the money will be made by creating an energetic, authentic hospitality guest experience because it helps to heal people emotionally, spiritually, and energetically.
SOP-Customer Satisfaction will die and there is already no point trying to keep it going with new technology, designs, new brands and sub-brands, greater efficiency, smells, and the like. Energetic, authentic Heart-Based Hospitality is the future of the hotel industry. … Smile!
