This topic will sound silly, I’m sure, to hoteliers who have never cared for cats, but if you have you will know how understanding cats and applying the lessons they can teach us could revolutionise hospitality. Indeed, they can help hoteliers and especially Executive Board members to discover the spiritual essence of hospitality, which is missing from their SOP-Customer Satisfaction operational manuals.
Here are 3 questions about cats. If Executive Board members could answer them and work out how to apply the answers to their brands, they would revolutionise hospitality and the hospitality industry would never be the same ever again.
- What do cats teach us?
- What kind of love do cats show to their carers?
- How do they show their love?
The answers show the lessons that cats can teach us, including about love, and why people miss their cats when they are not around. When employees provide genuine, spiritual hospitality – not the service-oriented stuff prescribed and trained by corporate offices – guests will miss the hotel a bit like a cat carer misses their cat when it dies or goes missing. Having looked after many abandoned cats over the years, I know these feelings well. My wife and I have 17 at the moment.
Just imagine what the hospitality experience could be like if Executive Boards knew the answers to the questions above and also knew how to apply the answers to their brands! They would discover that they have been leading the industry down the wrong path for many decades: the Service Path instead of the Hospitality Path. The Hospitality Path is where the money will be made now and in the future.
The following comes from an article called What Cats Can Teach Us About Love and it not only helps to answer the questions above, but it also helps to explain what cats can teach the hospitality industry:
As my friends who lost their cat express it:
“We received the blessing of his life and were, ultimately, powerless to prevent his death. The blessing and the loss are tied together. He taught us so much about love and attachment. We always tried to make life as good as possible for him, and we realize that we never could have given as much as we received.”
To live fully is to love fully, whether with our partner, friends, family – or cherished four-legged companion. And when we experience inevitable loss, perhaps we can find some comfort knowing that the depth of our loss equates to the love that has lived – and continues to live – in our hearts.
To anyone who has lost a beloved pet: You loved them dearly and they loved you. Perhaps they taught you how to love and be loved. May this love continue to live in your hearts and shine into a world that also needs your love.
A hotel experience should be like this, and in a generation or two it will be, I believe. For now, it’s impossible in view of the path that Executive Boards insist on misguidedly taking the hotel industry down. But one day, someone on a hotel group Executive Board who looks after cats will realise that the missing element in the hospitality experience is precisely how cats love us.
The Executive Boards will still have to work out how to generate that level of love in their employees, but to help them get started you do it by developing spiritual capacity. This requires a revolution in hotel employee development, but eventually, that revolution will take place, and hopefully in my lifetime as I long to see the Rut of Tradition being filled in.
I am sure that corporate folks and many hoteliers will consider this to be nonsense. But then why are Cat Cafes so popular and financially successful? What about adopting a few cats and letting them run around the hotel, including the staff canteen? Observe the effect they have on the employees and guests and think about why. Then you will see as clear as day what is missing from the guest experience.
