There is growing awareness in the hotel industry, and there has been for some time, it’s not new, that there is something intangible missing in the hospitality provided in hotels because generally speaking it is not making the much-sought after kind of emotional connection to guests, which will increase revenue, and make guests want to flock to the brand. Hospitality seems to be in the lower vibrations, and I would like to try to shed some light on why this is so, and to make the point that the hotel industry can revolutionise hospitality by changing from the obsolete, mechanistic Newtonian worldview to the energetic Quantum worldview.
Firstly, it appears that many hotel groups as well as individual hotels are grasping at straws as they try to create the much-sought after emotional connection, and to make their hospitality stand out. One such straw is technology, which seems to have become the main source of hope, even though instinctively we know that it is not going to help much in creating a profound, emotional connection because convenience, speed, and comfort are the main domains of technology.
Some hotel groups have decided that the solution lies in creating new brands with colourful designs, new lobby and furniture styles, casual uniforms, technology, local culture, etc. As a result, there has been a proliferation of so-called lifestyle brands. Even world famous designers are brought in to help in order to create the kind of designs, which will produce the elusive emotional connection. But instinctively, we know that this is not going to help much.
A few hotel groups have even turned to Emotional Intelligence to solve the problem, but an intellectual approach, which improves the ability to understand and manage emotions so as to improve interactions with others, will not create the desired emotional connection because it excludes the energetic and spiritual dimensions. Indeed, plenty of research has been carried out on the effects of Emotional Intelligence in the work environment and in hospitality and has shown its limitations.
Empathy has been called in now to create an emotional connection. But empathy is, at its simplest, merely awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people. Hotels everywhere should have been showing empathy for decades. It is an indication perhaps of how far hospitality has strayed from its spiritual essence. In any case, instinctively, we know that showing empathy is not going to help much.
In my opinion the fundamental cause of the emotional connection problem is the obsolete Newtonian worldview of the hotel industry, which is also called the Scientific-Materialist worldview, but I’ll refer to it as the Newtonian worldview because of its origin. I believe that hoteliers are completely unaware of this cause because nobody talks about it. They have inherited this worldview and grown up with it, like we all have, and they have based their thinking on it and have created their hotel systems, policies, procedures, and organisation structures with it. But mankind’s needs have changed, and now those systems, structures, and ways of thinking cannot meet the changing needs of mankind anymore. This is a global issue and isn’t specific to the hotel industry.
There is also the element that not every hotel group’s leaders are aware of the changing needs of human beings, which nowadays include people’s unspoken, emotional, energetic, well-being, and healing needs. Nor is every hotel group aware that the traditional focus on providing efficient and friendly SOP-Customer Satisfaction service is no longer enough to meet people’s unspoken needs. Some Executive Boards have insisted to me that their service is very efficient and friendly and that’s what matters, but this thinking reflects the Newtonian worldview, which is the foundation of the problem.
Efficient and friendly service will take care of the guest’s basic requirements, but it won’t meet the guest’s unspoken emotional, energetic, well-being, and healing needs, which are becoming more and more important as the world goes through its changes. To do this, hospitality has to be based on the energetic Quantum worldview. You cannot meet these needs in a worldview, which denies the existence of energy and spirituality. Perhaps the only hotel group, which has started to adapt to the Quantum worldview, and which is trying specifically to meet these unspoken needs, is a growing group of hotels called “The Healing Hotels of the World”.
I know that it must sound very strange to hoteliers when I refer to a worldview as being the cause of the hospitality problem. They will be wondering why nobody has said this before or talked about it at hotel conferences. Al Gore would probably call it an “inconvenient truth”. But as I’ve said, this problem is not unique to the hotel industry. The health industry, mainstream science, and education systems, for example, also face the same problem.
I believe that there will be a revolution in hospitality, or perhaps I should say an evolution in hospitality, when the worldview of the hotel industry changes from the Scientific-Materialist / Newtonian worldview to the energetic Quantum worldview, which has already replaced it, in fact, though the hotel industry for the most part is unaware of this. This revolution will open doors to levels of hospitality far above the artificial ceiling of 5 Stars, which hotel groups can only dream of now.
Having said that, I think that we are, unfortunately, many years away from the hotel industry accepting the root cause of the problem and implementing the required changes. You see, while implementing the solution is actually quite simple in principle, hoteliers have to realise first that their way of looking at the world is incomplete. This is the hard part because hoteliers have spent their whole career inside the structures, systems, and thinking of the Newtonian worldview. It’s like telling an Oncologist that chemotherapy and radiation are not the cures for cancer. Moreover, hoteliers are used to looking outwards for physical things to create change, not inwards.
Nevertheless, hospitality cannot reach the countless levels above 5 Stars until the industry changes its worldview. You cannot make a turboprop plane break the sound barrier. So, until the hotel industry changes its worldview, hotel groups will continue to grasp at straws.
Besides, which Executive Boards talk about energy and spirituality, and hospitality based on love, kindness, and compassion? The day will come, though, when this is the norm, even though this seems so unlikely now. But the world is changing and the hotel industry will have to adapt. The spiritual qualities of love and compassion are gaining ascendancy as the world is being permeated more and more with feminine ideals and qualities. Hospitality in the future will be far gentler and softer as the hotel industry changes its worldview, and it will radiate love and compassion. It will not be the low vibration, left brain activity it tends to be now.
I think that the hotel industry is unaware of what hospitality could and will become when it changes to the energy-oriented Quantum worldview, which, incidentally, replaced the 18th century Newtonian worldview in about 1925. Consider how long ago that is now. The Quantum worldview is being developed continuously as new scientific discoveries are made. However, apart from some independent hotels, the hotel industry has yet to start with even the basic elements of this worldview.
New brands are appearing all the time to try to freshen up hospitality because people are tiring of the rather soulless, traditional spirit of hospitality, but going by their websites, they all seem to be rooted in the current Newtonian worldview, particularly the brands created by the well-established, traditional hotel groups.
I compare the difference between what hospitality is now and what it will become to someone who is blindfolded with a nose peg over his nose while standing in a beautiful forest of old, sunlit trees with a colourful carpet of sweet-smelling flowers covering the whole forest floor far into the distance all around while birds fly and chatter all around. Only when he removes the blindfold and nose peg does he realise what beauty he has been missing.
The Newtonian worldview is a mechanistic way of looking at the world. It is largely based upon the change in thinking that occurred around the time of Descartes in the early 17th century. Descartes changed things by separating mind and matter, and by saying that everything in the universe was made of unconscious matter; that everything worked like a machine and behaved according to certain fixed laws; and that nothing could be affected by the mind. Science, though, has proved that this way of thinking is obsolete now, and we know this from life experience, but this worldview still underpins much of 21st century society and has influenced the modern hotel industry tremendously.
Galileo Galilei, who lived at around the same time as Descartes, supported the mechanistic view, and added that if something couldn’t be measured, it therefore had no meaning or importance. This includes energy, which we now know is everywhere, that everything is made of energy, that it affects everything, and that we emit energy every time we have a thought, feeling, or emotion. I mention this because the hotel industry generally has excluded energy and the mind from hospitality.
Newton, who lived in the late-17th century and early 18th century, showed that the universe worked like a great big mechanism or machine. He showed that in order to understand the machine, you just had to split it into its parts, study how each part worked, and work out its relation to the other parts. Only the systems and the parts were important to the functioning of the machine, so the mind and energy were excluded. His materialist, reductionist, non-energetic worldview became known as the Newtonian worldview, and it is still used by the hotel industry to create the guest experience templates and the templates for opening new hotels.
There are two defining features of this worldview, which are relevant to hospitality:
- Firstly, the worldview is only concerned with things that can be seen and measured.
- Secondly, everything is viewed as a machine, and you can understand the machine by studying the parts and the systems. With this knowledge, you can then replicate the machine.
In this worldview, anything which cannot be seen or measured is ignored, and this includes, of course, the influence of the mind and energy, which exert an inextricable effect on everything. The Newtonian universe is purely material and energy-free, and this is reflected in the modern hotel industry, which constructs the guest experience like a machine made up of many parts, and energy and the mind are not used to enhance the spirit and feeling of the hospitality. Telling staff to smile and be friendly is not the same for obvious reasons.
Each hotel group has created a replicable, machine-like template of hospitality so that it can be reproduced in a new hotel anywhere in the world in a very short time. But when hospitality is mass-produced according to a template, which already excludes the dimensions of energy and spirituality, it cannot possibly create the much-sought after energetic and emotional connection.
The deficiency of the Newtonian worldview was shown plainly in the early 20th century when scientists, such as Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrödinger, discovered that everything was actually made of energy, not solid matter. The universe was not like a Newtonian machine after all. What looks like solid matter is actually made up of atoms and molecules, which are just pure energy. Indeed, they discovered that when you look at matter with a microscope, including a human being, although you can see the atoms, as you get closer to them, they disappear and you go inside the atoms because they are not solid. They are just energy. This information can be used to change the nature of hospitality, and to make 5- Star hospitality look like a Primary School project.
Sir Arthur Eddington, the British astrophysicist who lived in the early 20th century, wrote: “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” His colleague, Sir James Jeans, wrote: “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter …”
This was a major change in the way we perceive the world, and its implications for the hotel industry are immense. In this new Quantum worldview, we perceive a return to traditional wisdom about the mind, energy, and spirituality, and their effect on the world, and it provides the way to replace the spiritless, mechanical model of service and hospitality with a spiritual and energetic model. This should be the theme of hotel conferences, but it doesn’t even feature on the Agenda.
I believe that the hotel industry generally is unaware of these discoveries about the energetic nature of the universe and the influence of thoughts, feelings, and emotions on the world. As a result, it is not using these discoveries to transform hospitality by allowing hospitality to reflect its true energetic and spiritual nature. Because of this, hotels will find it very difficult to connect emotionally and energetically to the hearts of the guests. Hoteliers need to think new thoughts and to entertain new ideas, which may seem alien to them, in order to explore the new paradigm. Ultimately, doing this will increase revenue.
I think that the hotel industry generally has got so used to a muted spirit and feeling of hospitality, which is the product of the Newtonian worldview, that hoteliers cannot believe that anything better is possible. They do not realize what Quantum science is merely proving what ancient cultures, indigenous peoples, religious texts, and monasteries and temples in the Andes, Egypt, and Tibet have known for millennia, namely that everything is made of energy, and that the mind can influence everything. Hospitality will be transformed when the mind and energy are used effectively to create it.
Sceptics entrenched in the Newtonian worldview consider energy irrelevant to creating hospitality. Indeed, many hoteliers in my experience seem to be totally unfamiliar with what energy is or can do. They don’t know that you can make crops grow far better by radiating love energy to them. You can heal people over any distance by sending healing energy. You can send loving thoughts to people across the world and see the immediate change in their energy field. You can send thought energy from space to influence an experiment on Earth. You can send feelings of love and peace to a city to reduce crime, accidents, terrorist events, etc., by about 25%. You can heal a cancer patient next to you in 3 minutes by sending energy to them. You can enhance love in a relationship by sending love energy to your partner. You can communicate thoughts to someone in another country so that they contact you.
You can even have people around a country the size of Australia visualise and “feel” rain, and make it rain to end a drought. You can change the structure of water and make it healthier to drink by means of your thoughts. You can change the energy of a room by sending loving energy into an object and by then placing the object in a room. This is all measurable. It is old science now. This and so much more is possible when you see the world as energy. But the hotel industry is stuck in the mire of the mechanical Newtonian worldview totally unaware of how hospitality could be transformed by changing the industry’s worldview.
What I have just described shows how consciousness can affect the world. The Newtonian worldview does not allow for the influence of consciousness, but the effect has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt. Consciousness includes a number of things. It’s how we perceive the world, our thoughts, feelings, emotions, our being aware, our intentions, and our beliefs, for example.
Hotel staff affect the energy of the hospitality through their consciousness just by being in the hotel. The vibration of their thoughts, feelings, worries, and emotions, and the nature of their perceptions, intentions, and beliefs affect the spirit of the hospitality without them realising it. Consequently, it is not enough simply to roll out a corporate hospitality template, train the SOPs, and try to instil friendliness in the practice of the SOPs. You also have to work on the vibrations of consciousness of every member of staff, if you want to go beyond what is the norm in hospitality. The spirit of hospitality in a hotel cannot change until consciousness is dealt with as an inextricable part of hospitality.
The vibrations of the consciousness of each member of staff are also affected by the energy of the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the guests in the hotel because we are all connected in a field of energy. This energy field can be photographed and measured. It’s not a New Age “thing”. Consequently, in order for hospitality to create a strong energetic and emotional connection to the heart, hotels should learn about energy and use a wide array of energy techniques and activities to change or shift the energy of the staff, guests, and the property. But this approach to creating hospitality requires the Quantum worldview and does not fit in the Newtonian worldview, which underlies the hotel industry.
