I don’t think that the hotel industry understands the implications of the following statement for the hospitality experience. Certainly, hotel conference organisers don’t.
International hotel industry conferences, such as the IHLA’s INSPIRE conferences, consider how to make guests happy. They focus on material means to achieve this, such as contactless technology and software, as well as on left-brain ideas and approaches. But technology doesn’t make you happier. It just provides convenience and efficiency.
Hotel conferences never have on their Agenda talks or discussions about how to touch the spiritual heart of the guests through compassion, metta loving-kindness, and heartwarming care, which are the core values that make up the spiritual essence of hospitality and which are based on unconditional love. I suppose that this topic isn’t considered to be respectable enough for their Agenda or even relevant to the hotel industry.
I expect that their conferences make lots of money, but the organisers are holding back the hotel industry and preventing a revolution in hospitality from taking place by not knowing that happiness is a spiritual state and that true guest happiness doesn’t come from the topics they discuss.
The organisers clearly have no understanding of or feeling for the spiritual essence of hospitality. Their conferences simply trot out the same kinds of ideas and approaches on their Agenda each year to make money, and nobody questions this. I expect that the IHLA’s INSPIRE 2023 will just be more of the same as in 2022. No disrespect is intended, but conferences focus on the service experience and not on hospitality, which is the spiritual heart of the guest experience, and which cannot be improved by typical conference topics.
We need major hotel industry conferences with themes, such as “How to Touch the Spiritual Hearts of the Guests”, “How to Restore the Spiritual Essence of Hospitality”, “Hospitality Desperately Needs a New Direction”, “How to Transform the Spirit and Energy of Hospitality”, “How to Revolutionise the Hospitality Industry So That It Serves Mankind’s Needs”, and suchlike. Such themes would truly inspire hoteliers and bring about more change than the common run-of-the-mill Agenda topics.
But for goodness sake, the organisers should not invite anyone from the big hotel groups, such as Marriott, Accor, IHG, Hyatt, Best Western, and other such “leading” hotel groups to speak at the conferences because they represent the old-style thinking about hospitality of the status quo. They are not harbingers of change. The conferences need enlightened people, rebel hoteliers, and daring thinkers who understand that hospitality is unconditional love in action and not related to corporate SOP-Customer Satisfaction. Change in the spirit and energy of hospitality will come from such people and not from speakers drawn from large hotel group Executive Boards.
Hoteliers around the world have got to stop copying the big hotel groups. In spite of being hoteliers for many years, their Executive Boards still don’t know that hospitality is a spiritual path trodden with practical feet. It is based on unconditional love, not corporate SOPs. Not a single one of these hotel “leaders” includes even a part of the spiritual essence of hospitality in their mission and vision statement. Yet their VPs become adored and admired Key Note speakers at hotel conferences.
Until there is a radical change in hotel conference themes and Agendas, and the hotel industry accepts the spiritual nature of hospitality and happiness, the guest experience will continue to focus on creating customer satisfaction according to SOP manuals and brand manual guidelines. This should have stopped several decades ago.
Getting Executive Boards to understand the spiritual essence of hospitality seems to be impossible because they are stuck rigidly and inflexibly in their traditional ways of thinking about service and their belief that technology makes guests truly happy. At the same time, hoteliers generally seem to be happy to follow and copy what the industry’s leaders do and recommend at hotel industry conferences, and also to practise what tradition and the status quo require of them.
But I believe that future generations of hoteliers will understand, and the spirit of hospitality will undergo the inevitable revolution. The current generation of hoteliers seems to be too afraid to change and embrace the spiritual essence of hospitality. Indeed, many readers will probably laugh at the idea of discussing the current level of unconditional love, compassion, kindness, etc. in the daily briefing. But one day this will be the norm.
If hoteliers want guests (and employees) to be happy, they must radically change how they develop their employees. Increase their spiritual capacity, and create a spirit of hospitality that exudes unconditional love, compassion, metta loving-kindness, and heart-warming care. When you increase a person’s spiritual capacity, they become their true unconditionally loving, compassionate, kind, and caring self, more and more. The figurative ice around their spiritual heart melts away and they become transformed.
What happens is quite beautiful to see! The way the employees serve you slows down and becomes graceful. Their energy changes, they smile more easily, and the spirit of hospitality is transformed. You can’t achieve the same with traditional training methods and the old-style, mid-twentieth-century concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction. But it seems that the current generation of hoteliers and Executive Boards either don’t dare to change or refuse to do so.
It’s not difficult to revolutionise the spirit of hospitality. But hoteliers have to be open to change and open to accepting that the corporate model that started to be adopted in the twentieth century does not meet the current spiritual, energetic, emotional, and wellness needs of human beings.
Unfortunately, globally the hotel industry continues to focus on providing service according to emotionless, efficiency-oriented operational manuals that usually originate in corporate offices and which are totally divorced from the spiritual essence of hospitality. The manuals also seem to have been sanitised by unhappy lawyers who sit in black, windowless offices.
It is insane that this continues year after year and decade after decade and nobody notices that the emperor is naked. If anyone does notice, then they seem to be too afraid to speak out. Unfortunately, hotel conferences don’t question and merely reinforce the old-style approach to service and hospitality, so the hospitality industry is stuck in a muddy rut without any traction to get out.
