The Changing Landscape of Hospitality
Part 2 - The sustainability conundrum
Before we begin…
If you look at pyramids depicting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Hospitality, Safety and Security are the two bottom levels.
While TikTokers, self-appointed influencers, and companies with big marketing budgets wow us with their ability to balance like ballerinas on the pointy top of Maslow’s pyramid, their awareness of what’s actually holding them up is frighteningly scarce. (Hint: the platform they rely on is not a social media one.)
In this three-part series, I am looking at how the hospitality landscape is changing. In the coming years, the ability to do a pirouette on your tippy toe at the top of the pyramid will be replaced by a renewed focus on the foundational pieces we have neglected for far too long.
When people are asked what the greatest challenge facing hospitality is today, the answers are often variations on common themes: Inflation, Labour shortages, Climate Change, Housing affordability…
When I’m asked that question, I always have the same one-word answer.
Uncertainty
The only thing we know is that we don’t know what tomorrow brings. We like to think we know. We like to plan like we know. We behave like we know.
Trust me, we don’t know.
If I knew what tomorrow was going to bring, I might have thought twice about starting two hospitality consulting companies a month before a global pandemic obliterated the global market.
But hey, I was acting on the best available forecasts, prognoses, and intelligence.
Trust me, we don’t know what tomorrow brings!
We do know that the foundation we all need to survive isn’t going to change.
Technology can change massively in a very short period of time. Humans will still evolve very slowly, and no matter how much technology changes, we still need food, shelter, and security.
And when I say we, I mean all of us!
Before we start part 2 of this series, here’s the link to part 1.
The Changing Landscape Part 2 - The Sustainability Conundrum
In the early years of my career, when sustainability was almost exclusively focused on the environment, most policies had a cost-saving effect in addition to marketing potential.
Use less energy = save money. Use less water = save money. Do less laundry = save money. Market this as “saving the planet” and the bottom-line value was indisputable.
Just to be clear. It’s not the planet that needs to be saved. The planet will survive even if life doesn’t. In that case, Earth will better live up to its nickname, “Third Rock from the Sun.”
In some ways, corporate sustainability programs remind me of fire evacuation plans that end up in the parking lot. We can brag about having a plan and testing it, but we omit the fact that we’re unprepared for a worst-case scenario when the fire is real, the building is destroyed and we can’t simply go back to normal after roll call.
When some ski resorts in Europe couldn’t open during this past season because they had little or no snow, several resorts in North America were quick to see Europeans as a new market. They proclaimed to have guaranteed snow that they marketed with phrases like “champagne powder”.
In a recent news article, the owner of an agricultural business said he longed for a “normal” season. Normal is only found in statistics. No matter what “normal” looks like, we’re stuck with reality.
Where I live, the reality is that we’re amid an unprecedented drought, unprecedented wildfires, and almost unprecedented stretches of heatwaves.
Favourable winds have thus far left us with clear skies while neighbouring areas of our province suffer from dense smoke from wildfires.
Should this be something our local tourism businesses can use as a competitive advantage for as long as the wind blows in our favour?
In the early stages of the pandemic, we saw signs of how quickly organised societies became mad free for alls when people felt that their basic needs were under threat. The richest countries hoarded medicine and vaccines. On the front lines at Walmart, people hoarded toilet paper and cleaning products. When shelves were near empty, there were outbreaks of violence.
Sustainability programs should be looking beyond the fluffy feel-good campaigns of banning plastic straws and planting trees, and preparing for how to best manage a situation where water shortages, extreme weather, or other issues cause mass evacuations.
They should be working collaboratively, too. Using preparedness simply to be better than your neighbour doesn’t cut it when everyone is at risk. A hotel that hoards water will soon become at risk if the general public, including their own staff, can’t access a safe supply.
I remember once seeing pictures of a car factory in an earthquake zone that had been designed to the highest standards to withstand powerful quakes. When a big one hit, the engineers that designed the factory could celebrate. It was almost unscathed.
It was closed though, because roads were no longer passable and buildings that included the homes staff lived in and factories for suppliers were destroyed.
When the OSAC Hotel Security Working Group, which I was a founding member of, launched in 2007, one of the key motivations for us was that security wasn’t something we should compete on.
Besides the obvious fact that every life is valuable and should be protected, there were business reasons for our motivation too.
If a serious incident occurred at a hotel, all hotels at the destination risked losing business if public opinion deemed the destination unsafe. Working together to ensure all hotels were as safe as possible was what drove us to develop and deliver joint training workshops around the world. We were working with our competitors to make the foundations for our businesses stronger.
We need to take the same approach to sustainability efforts. We need to accept that normal is what reality gives us and we need to move beyond the cost-saving and feel-good marketing campaigns to build sustainability programs that are collaborative in nature, beneficial to all, and better suited to sustain us through coming challenges.
We’ve already seen airline marketing campaigns in Europe stopped because they promise more than they deliver on the sustainability front. Pulling a costly marketing campaign is hugely expensive. If we stop trying to score promotional points we’ll be making better business decisions and better decisions for everyone on this single planet we all share.
Let’s start looking at how we can successfully sustain our societies through the challenges we know we will face, instead of selfishly looking at what makes us look better than our neighbours.
Stay safe, Always Care
Thanks for reading the Always Care Community newsletter.
This was part two of a three-part series. The third post, “The Ubiquitous Value of Security” will be published in a few days.
At Always Care, we help hospitality businesses make jobs more meaningful and guest experiences more memorable by helping you make the most of the biggest differentiator you have – your people!
We’re so passionate about hospitality that we wrote a book about it!
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