RETHINKING

Rethinking the Guest Experience on a Subtle Level

D1 Ginka | Sep 22, 2012 | Comments 0

When a major new direction comes along, it is usually met with opposition or even outrage, or maybe just with a cold shoulder, as it involves change. The upholders of the status quo may try to ignore the new direction, but as people show interest, they have to choose between accepting it and rejecting it. If a company chooses wrongly, perhaps out of arrogance and self-importance, it may fall by the wayside. The concept of the energetic guest experience is an example of such a new direction, and one whose effectiveness is supported and explained by scientific research.

Although I thought it would take at least ten years for the change to occur, within just a few years hotel groups will most certainly be forced to choose between sticking to their venerable traditions and using energy to create their guest experience. Indeed, the glimmer of the new dawn has already appeared, perhaps because many hotel General Managers know that the western concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction is obsolete and that it has reached a dead end.

But the competition for the large hotel groups will not come from other large hotel groups because they will lack the inertia and will to change. No, it will come from upstart and daring independent hotels and small or fringe hotel groups. Remember that it was not a fellow giant who brought Goliath to his knees, but an ordinary man with an idea.

Hotels and hotel groups, which make the changeover to creating an energetic guest experience, will enjoy much higher occupancy rates and revenue because this is exactly the kind of guest experience, which people want nowadays.

The obsolete left brain, western model of SOP-Customer Satisfaction, which hotel groups, such as Starwood, Marriott, Accor, IHG, Best Western, and hotel groups in India and China, for example, continue to sell, is a pale reflection of how hotels can be and will be in the future. Very pale! No, a mere shadow! The big corporate offices seem to be unable or unwilling to see this, perhaps because they are so deeply entrenched in old paradigms. But future CEOs will have sharper vision.

It is very easy to create an energetic guest experience once you know how, but you have to throw out much of the ballast of tradition while adding elements, which conservative corporate decision makers are unlikely to understand or accept. Worse still they must first admit that there is something wrong with the experience which their hotels are serving up, but where is there a corporate office which can see anything wrong with SOP-Customer Satisfaction? Their customers can see it, even if they cannot or will not.

Hoteliers would be wise to start to study energy, especially thought energy and heart energy, and to work out how to apply it to increase the vibration of the guest experience in their properties. The difficulty they will face, however, is that everything they discover will seem like New Age fantasy because it flies in the face of everything they learned at school decades ago. The new science will just not fit into the pervasive, narrow, traditional, left brain paradigms, and so for sure, the large western chains will ignore the use of energy, probably until it is too late for them.

Source: www.ehotelier.com

Ginka