It's the People, Stupid
AI isn't the solution to hospitality's challenges
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One of the first posts I wrote last year was called “It’s the People, Period”, but have a close look at the link address:
I edited the published title because my writer’s insecurity got the best of me.
The good news is, that frees up the original title for this week’s post. It’s an updated version of the introduction to our book, “Spin the Bottle Service - Hospitality in the Age of AI”. In the two years since we published the book, AI has become such a buzzword that it’s now marketing everything. I almost expected to receive AI-powered socks for Christmas and I continue to remind people that the first letter in AI stands for Artificial and that artificial is a fancy word for fake…
We live in an age of digitalization. When the pandemic locked us down, we opened up our digital devices and Zoomed into the world from wherever we were. We could explore anything anywhere, buy anything anytime, and sell anything to anyone. With food and drink delivered, we downloaded exercise videos with yoga, Pilates, and even Jane Fonda’s old aerobics routines to help keep some of us in shape – and shower guilt onto those of us who couldn’t find the strength to stop streaming and scrolling.
Soon enough our fridge app will talk to our supermarket app. We won’t have to order online anymore. The supermarket app will check our calendar app and schedule delivery. The supermarket app will talk to the wine store app. The wine store app will talk to our wine cooler app and ensure that the right bottle is available at the right temperature on our stay-at-home-steak-night-date-night.
We can do anything from the comfort of our couches.
Almost anything, that is.
As we emerged from the pandemic we didn’t “go back to normal”. People stayed home, ordered takeout from a delivery app and refused to leave their couches to return to their cubicles.
Hotels used the pandemic to tell us that cleaning and disinfecting rooms was important, although if you stay in a hotel they don’t clean your room as often as they used to.
Hotels also told us that they too had discovered A.I. even though “Use our app to personalize your experience” sounds like an oxymoron when you consider the alternative:
“Our concierge, Jan, will chat with you and help you choose experiences that best suit you.”
Hotels advertise that the use of mobile keys is to reduce the need for interaction with staff, so the guest would be safer during their stay. The subliminal message is that physically meeting a staff member could be harmful to your health.
In reality, these are just lame attempts to make reality sound like a guest benefit. Reality is “We’re cutting costs so we’re not going to clean your room every day and if you want to know what’s going on in town just Google it.”
Guess what? That’s not a benefit, it’s a sacrifice…
Digital innovation in hotels and hospitality is here to stay and, to be honest, a lot of it is overdue and will help smooth transactional parts of the business.
It mustn’t become a replacement for the true traveller or guest experience.
During a Hospitality Tomorrow webinar in April 2020, Wolfgang Neumann, former CEO of The Rezidor Hotel Group (now Radisson Hotel Group), said:
“Our industry, at the end of the day, is all about personal experiences and human interactions.”
Wolfgang used to be my boss. We might not have agreed on everything, (I once wrote him a memo that asked “What if we’re the bad guys.”) but he hit the nail on the head with this statement. It should be the mantra of every person in every corporate office every day.
In hotels, restaurants, or any hospitality business – actually, in almost any business – people are the true differentiators. As many of the transactional portions of business become less personal through digitalization, personal interactions will become even more important than they already are.
The Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, author of The Ugly Duckling, once wrote: “To travel is to live.” (Actually, he wrote, “At rejse er at leve,” but I thought it best to translate it for you to save you asking Google.)
As someone who wandered out into the big, wide world at the age of 18, I know what he meant when he wrote those words. Once I moved on from my “sink or swim” situation and joined a company that grew from 25 regional hotels in Scandinavia to over 1000 hotels in almost 100 countries, travel consumed a large portion of my life.
I went to strange places for strange reasons. To make it affordable, I went to Istanbul immediately after the bombs went off in the Grand Bazaar because I could get on cheap standby flights and stay in the Swissotel. I was upgraded to the Butler Floor because everyone else who had booked in that week had cancelled. I stayed in Hotel Ukraina in Moscow, when it was a Soviet-run Intourist hotel – where passports were confiscated until you checked out, and the phone rang every night with a husky, female voice saying “You want Russian girls?”. (The correct answer to that kind of question is always NO.)
Later, when I was married and my career took off, the experiences were mind-blowing. From the first-class champagne on intercontinental flights to five-star hotels to exclusive entertainment events, we’ve seen, felt, tasted, and tried more than I ever dreamed possible. Suites at the Park Hyatt Dubai, the then brand-new Bellagio in Vegas, and the remote Bushman’s Kloof in the South African wilderness.
Today, only a few experiences stand out as truly exceptional. These, our most memorable moments, were fewer and further between than we expected. Every exceptional experience had one common ingredient.
People.
The shoe shiners on the Istanbul ferry docks, the guides in Bali, and the taxi drivers in Shanghai are all reminders to us of the famous quote attributed to Maya Angelou:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
We’ll never forget how encounters with people we’ve met made us feel.
In the world of restaurants, hotels, and hospitality, there is another, simpler quote to keep in mind during these times of ever-increasing implementation of technology in day-to-day operations: “It’s the people, stupid!” They’re the ones who make the biggest difference, simply because of how they make people feel before, during, and after every meal, every meeting, or every stay.
A server at a Belgian brasserie. A 25-year-old chef and his mother. Two guys running a simple, bare-bones brasserie in Paris. A cadre in a strip mall restaurant. A three-star hotel with a five-star staff.
Implementing new technologies may be ever more affordable, but it’s still expensive. Changing the design, layout, or menu may also briefly attract or re-attract clientele, but the novelty will wear off.
When we wrote our book, our publisher was worried about the title. Fortunately, we conducted a non-random poll of people around the world that we knew would think it was an attention grabber. The publisher allowed us to proceed.
“Spin the Bottle Service” is not a game for pre-teens testing pubescent excitement.
It’s a way to replace the corporate standards that have become so mechanical, robotic, and repetitive that customers know the lines before they are said.
We took some of our most memorable moments from all over the world and shared them in the book. We also developed “Ditch the Scripts” a concept built on empathy, experience, and caring. It can be adapted and adopted by any hotel, restaurant, or guest-serving business anywhere.
The reason why we think people will enjoy being served by a robot is that we’ve tried to reduce the business of hospitality to a series of standardized transactions. Try reintroducing the idea that personalized service and experience are things that people facilitate for other people
Hospitality.
It’s the people
Stay safe, Always Care
Thanks for reading our newsletter!
If you’re in hospitality, read our book, Spin the Bottle Service. A local server told us it should be required reading for everyone who works in a restaurant or hotel.
If you’re an owner or manager, let’s chat about how Ditch the Script workshops make jobs more meaningful and guest experiences more memorable by unleashing the power of the biggest business differentiator you have available - people!
Don’t forget to have a look at the 87 Stories tab, where we share lessons learned at the University of Life.
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Thanks for the shoutout, Paul! I'll likely return to all your articles over the years. I've been feeling the pull of setting up holistic retreats or starting a community-oriented 'something.' Once I have more concrete ideas, I know who to contact!
Thank you so much for recommending AI ThreatScape, Paul! 😁🙏🏼