Covid-19 has provided an ideal opportunity for the hotel industry to reset the SOP-Customer Satisfaction concept used to create the guest experience.
What an opportunity the hotel industry has now to abandon the obsolete concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction and to replace it with heart-touching, energetic and spiritual, heart-based hospitality! With the lack of business, hoteliers now have the time to recreate hospitality according to its energetic and spiritual essence in unconditional love.
Think of the Possibilities!
I am not talking about replacing a static and limiting hospitality concept with another one. You see, there is no ceiling to energetic and spiritual hospitality. Once a hotel or hotel group is set up, the hospitality can become energetically and spiritually stronger and stronger limitlessly. In contrast, SOP-Customer Satisfaction always stays the same. It’s a ground level concept.
I believe that the energetic and spiritual nature of the hospitality that hotels provide will one day become the main area of competition between hotels. Hotels that become very good at creating it may be able to command a premium because people will pay to stay at a hotel that feels energetically special and where the hospitality is strong in unconditional love, loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. This is where true loyalty will arise. Not from some points programme.
I think that hoteliers generally know that something is fundamentally missing in SOP-Customer Satisfaction, but nobody dares to say anything about it at a hotel conference. Nor do the authors of articles dare to express this unspeakable thought. The growing trend for contactless service will worsen the situation. Worse still, after the pandemic the hotel industry will no doubt go back to providing the same old SOP-Customer Satisfaction experience.
The hotel industry has to move on some day so why not now? Is the well-worn and barren Rut of Tradition really so beautiful? When the next pandemic comes you will have loyal guests because everyone needs unconditional love, loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care and they will stay at hotels that provide it. Recreating the same old hospitality “normal” when you know that something is wrong with it is like moving back into your home when it is leaning over after an earthquake.
Dare to Change!
I know that energy and unconditional love are not words used in corporate boardrooms where nobody wants to rock the corporate boat. Even among independent hotels, will any of them perceive the financial benefits and wisdom of transforming their hospitality with energy and unconditional love? Yet, this transformation is what could be happening now and the virus has provided the window of opportunity.
It is unlikely that Covid-19 will be the last pandemic. What will hotels do after the next pandemic? Recreate SOP-Customer Satisfaction yet again? You know that it doesn’t meet people’s emotional, energetic, spiritual, wellness, and healing needs, so why would you want to keep recreating it? It’s like Toyota opening new factories to build a 2005 model of some Toyota cars. Yet I believe that this is what will happen, and that it may take a whole generation of time before the dawn of change and understanding appears.
How to Remove the Chain Hotel Competition
For many hotels, chain hotels are their direct competitors. If independent hotels started today, in even 6 months their hospitality would already start to be in greater demand than the SOP-Customer Satisfaction experience over at the competing chain hotels. Chain hotels won’t change because they are controlled by a Corporate Board, perhaps in some distant country, that upholds tradition.
Can you imagine one of the corporate folks on a hotel group Board saying: “I think we should change our focus from just satisfying guests according to our operational manuals to using energy and spirituality instead. Unconditional love should be our focus!”
There would be stunned silence followed by a few stifled giggles and then by relentless laughter. Gossip would spread like wild fire around the corporate office about the person’s suggestion. Yet, using energy and developing spiritual capacity will one day be the way that the hotel industry creates hospitality. It’s the only direction that the industry hasn’t considered.
In any case, if hotel groups did decide to change it would be like a kilometre-long oil tanker putting on the breaks to make a U-turn compared to a speedboat-like, independent hotel. If independent hotels make the change en masse, hotel chains will go out of business because they will change much too slowly, if at all.
I say that because why would guests stay at a chain hotel when they can experience unconditional love and a special energy at an independent hotel for the same price or less? Moreover, can anyone even imagine any of the leading hotel groups deciding to change to energetic and spiritual heart-based hospitality? They are already charging off into the barren wilderness of contactless hospitality, it seems. Perhaps though, there are a few listening ears out there in the wilderness.
