There is increasing awareness in the hotel industry that something intangible is missing in hospitality because generally speaking it is not making the sought-after emotional and energetic connection to the guest’s heart, which will increase revenue and make guests flock to the brand. Hospitality still feels energetically and emotionally weak in spite of all efforts to change this, and I would like to shed some light on why this is so. In short, the hotel industry would make the connection and revolutionise hospitality by changing from the mechanistic Newtonian worldview to the energetic Quantum worldview, which replaced it in 1925.
Hotel Groups Are Grasping at Straws
A look at what hotel groups are doing in order to try to create a truly emotional connection and to make their hospitality touch the heart shows that many are grasping at straws. 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 principal domains of technology.
Some hotel groups have decided that the solution lies in creating new brands with colourful designs, new lobby and furniture styles, technology, local culture, etc. As a result, there has been a proliferation of so-called lifestyle brands. But instinctively, we know that this is not going to help much.
A few hotel groups have turned to Emotional Intelligence to solve the problem, but an intellectual approach, which improves the ability to understand and manage emotions, will not create the desired emotional connection because it excludes the energetic and spiritual dimensions, which are essential to create the connection.
In my opinion the fundamental cause of the emotional connection problem is the obsolete Newtonian worldview of the hotel industry (also called the Scientific Materialist worldview). 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 organisational structures with it.
Hospitality Does Not Meet People’s Changing Needs
But mankind’s needs have changed, and now those systems and structures, and that way of thinking cannot meet the changing needs of mankind. This is a global issue and not specific to the hotel industry. I wonder how many hotel group leaders are aware of the changing needs of human beings, which nowadays include people’s unspoken, emotional, energetic, well-being, and healing needs. The members of the Healing Hotels of the World try to address these needs, but who else does?
Fortunately, more and more hotel group leaders are becoming aware that the traditional focus on providing efficient SOP-Customer Satisfaction service is no longer enough to meet people’s unspoken needs. However, hotel groups generally will not let go of SOP-Customer-Satisfaction and are giving it a paint job. Some Executive Board members have even insisted to me that their service is very efficient and friendly and that this is what matters. This thinking reflects the Newtonian worldview, which is the foundation of the emotional connection problem, and also shows the common confusion between hospitality and service.
Efficient and friendly service will take care of the guests’ basic service requirements, but it will not meet their unspoken emotional, energetic, well-being, and healing needs, which are becoming more and more important as the world undergoes change. 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; and denies that consciousness, thoughts, feelings, and emotions can affect people and the space between us, which science has been showing since 1925 that they do. The worldview used is scientifically obsolete, and it is holding back the development of hospitality.
The Worldview Is the Problem
It must sound very strange to hoteliers when I refer to a worldview as being the cause of the emotional connection 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 have said, this problem is not unique to the hotel industry. The health industry, orthodox science, and education systems, for example, also face the same worldview problem.
I believe that there will be a revolution and evolution in hospitality when the worldview of the hotel industry changes to the energetic Quantum worldview. This revolution will open doors to unimagined levels of hospitality far above the artificial ceiling of 5 Stars. But which Executive Board will dare to break with tradition and lead the change?
Unfortunately, I think that we are many years away from the hotel industry accepting the root cause of the problem and making the required changes. While implementing the solution is actually quite simple in principle, hoteliers have to accept 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 is like telling an Oncologist that chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery are not the cure for cancer. Moreover, hoteliers are used to looking outwards for physical things to create change, not inwards at intangibles.
Nevertheless, hospitality cannot reach the countless, energetic and spiritual hospitality 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 find it very difficult to create the desired, energetic, emotional connection to the heart – the kind, which makes you feel warm and fuzzy, and which should be the norm.
Hoteliers should stop thinking that there is nothing better possible than what hotels provide now. The essence of hospitality is unconditional love, kindness, compassion, and the resulting heart-warming care. It is a soft and gentle, energetic, and spiritual experience, which you can feel. But the Newtonian worldview has turned hospitality into an experience of efficient service according to systems and procedures. It has lost its heart. The Quantum worldview enables hotels to put back the energy and the spiritual heart.
The Nature of the Newtonian Worldview
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, and indeed we know this from life experience, but this worldview still underpins the hotel industry.
Galileo Galilei, who lived at around the same time as Descartes, supported the mechanistic view, and added that if something could not be seen or measured, it therefore had no meaning or importance. But nowadays we know that everything is made of energy; that it affects everything; that we can change, send, and use energy for different purposes, including conditioning spaces and healing with intentions; and that we emit energy every time we have a thought, feeling, or emotion. Energy can now even be measured, filmed, and photographed. I mention this because the hotel industry generally has excluded energy from hospitality.
Sir Isaac 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, spirituality, 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.
How the Worldview Affects Hospitality
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. We should not be surprized that creating an emotional, energetic heart connection in hospitality is proving elusive.
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 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 found not to be 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, including a human being, with a microscope, 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 could be used to revolutionise the nature of hospitality.
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 see a return to ancient 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 does not even feature on any Agenda.
I believe that the hotel industry generally is unaware of the scientific 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 the 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.
I think that the hotel industry generally has got so used to a muted spirit and feeling of hospitality, which is a product of the Newtonian worldview, that hoteliers cannot believe that anything better is possible. They do not realize that Quantum science is merely proving what ancient cultures, indigenous peoples, religious texts, and the 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.
Using Energy Opens Up New Possibilities
Sceptics entrenched in the Newtonian worldview consider energy irrelevant to creating hospitality. In my experience, many hoteliers seem to be totally unfamiliar with what energy is or can do. They do not 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, and even affect people over great distances by conditioning an object with an intention.
You can even have people around a country the size of Australia visualise and “feel” rain so as to make it rain and end a drought. You can change the structure of water and make it healthier to drink by means of your thoughts, and even clean a lake by having about 100 people send love energy to it for an hour. You can change the energy of a room by sending loving energy into an object and by then placing the object in the 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. It is so sad!
Using Consciousness is the Key
What I have just described shows how consciousness can affect the world. The Newtonian worldview does not allow for the influence of consciousness on people and spaces, but the effect has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt. Consciousness includes a number of things, such as how we perceive the world, our thoughts, feelings, emotions, our being aware, our intentions, and our beliefs, for example. Using consciousness will revolutionise hospitality!
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 current norm in hospitality. The spirit of hospitality in a hotel will not change until consciousness is dealt with as an inextricable part of hospitality. But where is there a listening ear?
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 is 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 consciousness, and use a wide array of energy techniques and activities to change the energy of the staff, guests, and the property. But this approach to creating hospitality requires a change to the Quantum worldview and does not fit in the Newtonian worldview, which underlies the hotel industry.
The Only Untrodden Path Left
When hotel groups finally realize that they have come to a dead-end with SOP-Customer Satisfaction and that it cannot be improved any further, even by improving efficiency and the SOPs; even by increasing friendliness; even by adding more apps; even by incorporating more technology into the hotel; even by changing the design, the Lobby layout, the amenities, the bed, the colours, the smells, etc.; and even by creating a new brand or by changing the CEO; they will have to explore the only direction left, and they will discover how by using a Quantum worldview hospitality concept based on love and the energy and spiritual dimensions they can transform the hotel industry for ever and open up new levels of hospitality considered impossible with the hotel industry’s Newtonian worldview. Why wait for that day? Change is inevitable and the path is available now!
When the hotel industry wakes up to the possibilities of the Quantum worldview, we will see a wonderful and unimagined transformation in the nature of hospitality. Hospitality, which is strong in energy and spirituality, loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care, and which touches the heart, will be the norm.
The world is changing rapidly and hotel groups, which focus on meeting people’s unspoken emotional, energetic, healing, and well-being needs, will dominate the hotel industry. I urge hotel groups to leave the Newtonian Rut of Tradition and to enter and embrace the Quantum world of hospitality and limitless possibilities! This will be an immense service to mankind and an invaluable legacy.
