Limitless Levels of Guest Experience Higher Than 5-Stars Are Possible
An Approach to Staff Development That Will
Revolutionize the Guest Experience
The hotel industry is being held back by tradition, outdated ideas and paradigms about staff development, and the lack of application to the industry of advances in science and human understanding, all of which limit the nature of the guest experience being created. The situation is worsened by the continuous implementation in new hotels of the pervasive cloneable guest experience that is based on standards of performance (SOPs) and the idea that somehow customer satisfaction is still actually a worthy concept of service. Unfortunately, this kind of guest experience has become the default standard for the industry, including at the 5-star level.
Advances in human knowledge have opened the door to the possibility of a completely new kind of hotel guest experience that has no limit to its nature. The message here is that for those willing to move on from the cloneable SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience, you can revolutionize the nature of the hotel guest experience and raise it to far higher levels than 5-stars. This article should be of special interest to hotels that call themselves 7-star.
The key to reaching those higher levels is to break away from established paradigms and thinking about staff development. As Albert Einstein said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." The 5-star category is simply the highest level you can reach with current thinking. It does not mean that there are no levels higher than 5-stars. Indeed, there is no limit.
I would like to introduce you briefly to a very different path that leads to higher levels, and which is very suited to hotels calling themselves 7-star. The well-trodden path of the corporate approach to hotel development is based on thinking that has had its day. Just because most hotel groups use basically the same SOP-Customer Satisfaction approach to staff development, it does not mean that it is the path to follow in the future.
Advances in human understanding show very clearly that the key to reaching those higher levels is to focus not just on developing knowledge and skills, but also on increasing emotional energy, spiritual energy, and thought energy in the staff. When you can do this well, you can make a quantum leap in the emotional and spiritual nature of the guest experience, and which will make you stand out. The material splendour of the hotel will take second place.
This is not theory. It works and is easy to demonstrate. The scientific explanations are also there for people to see, and so it is a shame to see corporate offices and hotels clinging so stubbornly to the well-trodden path that leads through the Valley of SOP-Customer Satisfaction to those uninspiring destinations of Normalville and Similarville.
To create a special kind of spirit you need to know how to apply new knowledge about the body’s energy system and vibrations. The way to create a genuine 7-star hotel is not simply to lavish the property with gold, silver, marble, designer furnishing, and technology, but rather to increase the levels of emotional energy, spiritual energy, and thought energy. There are other kinds of energy that are useful and which will be developed in the future as even higher levels are reached.
The more you develop these three kinds of energy in your staff, the more your guest experience will become infused with love (for fellow human beings), (genuine) warmth, care (from the heart), empathy (and intuition), compassion, kindness, creativity, and mystery with an intensity that your hotel has never known. There is no limit to what the guest experience can become when you focus on these three types of energy alone.
This may shock some of you, but when you know how to develop this energy really well, and it is easy to do so, the guests will feel it, especially when the staff are within 1-2 metres. You can use it to increase revenue in a variety of ways that SOP-Customer Satisfaction cannot as it is left-brain oriented and very limited in what it can achieve and create.
Independent hotel owners should pay attention to this because they can create a vastly superior guest experience by developing these three types of energy in their staff. For sure, the majority of hotel groups will cling to tradition, to the belief that there is no need to change, and to old paradigms for quite some years to come, thereby giving the edge to independent hotels and small groups that dare to break away from the past; some perhaps led by the General Managers and senior managers who write to me about how they are disillusioned with the corporate approach. The financial implications are worth thinking about. The guest experience that has served the large chains well until now will most certainly not do so in the future, and technology will not fill the gap.
When you develop emotional energy you also create the desire in the staff to want to show love, care, empathy, and warmth to the guests whom they see in a new light. The resulting spirit is very different to what corporate care programmes create, and comparable to the difference between smelling a leaf and a fragrant rose in bloom. Furthermore, there is no limit to the depth of the desire you can create.
Spiritual energy is also essential. This is about deepening the staff continuously in the core spiritual values of hospitality, such as love, care, warmth, kindness, compassion, empathy, and the use of intuition. You do this best in my experience by touching the heart of the staff with certain kinds of stories and music, role plays based on a certain kind of quotations relating to the core values, and combining this with service interactions as well as other elements. When you develop spiritual energy and emotional energy together, the two impact each other and the service and guest experience change significantly.
These two types of energy alone will create a guest experience that your SOP-Customer Satisfaction oriented competitors do not have. But when you add thought energy, you can take it much further. The three together seem to create synergy between each other. When you develop thought energy amongst your staff and the ability to benefit from the Law of Attraction, you create in them a tremendous amount of inner motivation that no amount of traditional motivation-development activities can achieve.
By breaking away from the traditional focus on job knowledge and skills mixed with the usual customer satisfaction training, you can create what the Princess D’Annam in Vietnam chose as its mission, namely, “… to create a guest experience, which fulfils the innermost dreams of [the] guests, and make the guests feel like they are in heaven”. As a result, your hotel will be much sought after, even if it has less material splendour.
I feel sure that many readers, especially in tradition-based corporate offices, will be thinking that this is all nonsense. Actually, the opposite is true. When you know how to put it into practice, it really works, and various branches of science have proved its validity.
You can develop the guest experience further by implementing a system of continuous self-development and Team Leader-led activities that develop the three kinds of energy and create deeper feelings of happiness and well-being.
The hotel industry is just so used to copying a well-worn approach to creating the guest experience that it has become blinkered to the possibility of a far better way that can take the guest experience well beyond the traditional, self-imposed, and imaginary limit of 5-stars.
The staff at the Princess D’Annam in Phan Thiet, Vietnam commented that they were able to open the flood gates that dammed up their love and warmth for people. You could see the change in their faces. The Raj Palace in Jaipur, India has a completely new spirit that has resulted in guest comment books over the last 10 months that the so-called best hotels in the world would envy. Travel agents have commented on the change. The revenue of a restaurant and lounge bar at the Sheraton Sukhumvit Grande in Bangkok spiked significantly. The team of lounge hostesses commented amusingly on the sudden increase in the repeat-guest rate of male guests. The opening management team at the Centara Krabi Bay Resort in Thailand remarked about the spirit of love amongst their staff, and the warmth of their service. When two management team members left for another chain hotel opening they said that the spirit being created by the corporate programmes was at nowhere near the same level of intensity and emotion while “love” was never mentioned.
If you dare to leave the safe and normal environment of SOP-Customer Satisfaction, and learn to tap into the body’s energy system, you will create a guest experience of a very different kind. As much as one may dislike the thought, one has to accept the fact that the Age of the SOP-Customer Satisfaction Guest Experience is over... unless one wishes to cling stubbornly and rather sadly to the illusion that it is not, rather like: “We’ve been doing it this way for decades. It works and it’s good for our shareholders! Besides, don’t you know who we are?”
The new paradigm will increase your profits because it enables you to stand out from the many competitors that are appearing around you, particularly in countries, such as the UAE, where hundreds of new hotels are being built. One day the owners of those hotels will discover that a huge expenditure on material splendour was not the key to financial success after all.
It will probably take another 10 years before these ideas start to become main-stream as the hotel industry is traditionally slow to change, but they will do because understanding how to work with the body’s energy system is becoming the key to quantum leaps in other branches of human endeavour. The hospitality industry will catch on eventually. So there are obvious advantages for those hotels that get their foot in the door early by learning how to apply the ideas.
Although traditionalists won’t like to hear it, these ideas create the possibility of unlimited levels of guest experience above 5-stars. By applying even just the basic ideas above, hotels will eventually bring about the demise of the cloneable hotel experience. While this is bad news for many hotel chains around the world, it is good news for the independent hotels and very small hotel groups as they will be able to create a guest experience that the hotel chains will most probably not be able to owing to their rigid structure, traditions, and usually huge size. The guest experience of independent hotels will only be limited by their imagination. In the words of Albert Einstein, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.”
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