Shift Happens!? When You Exceed Guest Expectations

Are you indispensable to your guests?

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Successful hospitality and tourism companies are becoming indispensable to their guests?by moving past basic transactions and providing experiences that solve a broader set of their guests’ expectations. For others, their approach to hospitality and tourism needs a significant upgrade grounded in a commitment to become indispensable to the guest through an exponentially deeper level of engagement. It’s time for some hard choices.?

Many of us have experienced a downward spiral in excellent guest service. Calls are outsourced to individuals reading from a script and have no authority to solve a problem. Many hotels and resorts need more staff, so they provide more training. As a result, hospitality organizations must get honest about being guest-centric.?

Delivering this vision requires companies to put the guest at the center of their organizations so they can orchestrate experiences that meet guests’ ever-rising expectations. With the increase in travelers and staff shortages, I have observed the industry generating millions of dollars in short-term income while potentially losing repeat visits due to the substandard experiences guests currently experience.?

Rapidly shifting guest behaviors, increased competition, a proliferation of new technologies, and staffing issues exert massive pressure on traditional hospitality business models. Because occupancy is high, many companies refrain from making?decisions because of internal politics, fear of P&L conflicts, and significant gaps in capabilities; they need to catch up on the total potential value of repeat guest visits.

Guests have access to technology, social media, and pricing models that give them factual time information. As a result, guest behaviors have shifted, and they know they now have a voice giving rise to their expectations. In 2023 most economic areas will recover, thus increasing competitive pressure worldwide.

This creates significant limitations in creating seamless and scalable guest experience journeys.

Ask yourself:?Are we driven to sell more products that don’t address

our guests’ needs and wants?

This Shift requires rethinking the guest experience to encapsulate the full range of guest issues and interests related to a business’s core product. Analyzing data and using focus groups help, but detailed research to understand every consideration and activity is crucial to becoming indispensable to guests.?

Today hospitality and tourism leaders need to commit to an unflinching evaluation of the current reality and stop using short-term occupancy rates to lure them into a false sense of long-term survival and room rate stability.?This is a dangerous view, especially with expected economic uncertainty ahead.

Unfortunately, many companies need more full, narrow, and correct beliefs about what their guests care about. In many cases, this results from entrenched mindsets or incentives that reward people for only optimizing revenue within the narrow bounds of them operational responsibility.

The truth is that most companies need to design and implement cost-efficient operations effectively.?I suggest companies commit to hiring talent and training new and existing staff to create a critical mass for change. And while they need essential skills—data entry, front desk management, F&B deliverables, housekeeping, amenities, etc., it’s more important that they prefer action over analysis, an obsession with the guest, and a willingness to test ideas quickly with guests.

The pace of “shift” will reward those companies that are the fastest to learn and adapt.?The best learning happens through constant experimentation. That requires companies to become comfortable with failure and make experimenting easy to test ideas and capture and share the results. Good data helps create alignment and gives leaders the confidence to make decisions quickly, even when these decisions are not in line with historical experience.?

The most crucial point to remember is that guest experience goal should drive operational decisions, to untether them from their legacy systems, not the other way around. The solution requires specific objectives and key results that are tied to guest experience and profitability, a set of input metrics to identify root-cause issues quickly, and a system of strict enforcement of those metrics. to serve the most pressing needs and wants of your guests. This requires a commitment to becoming indispensable to the guest. That means hard choices and significant changes to create a profitable and sustainable way to ensure Shift Happens.

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