Why staying at top hotels is rarely a top experience!
When you travel a lot, as I am privileged to do, it does not take a quality background to be quite disappointed about the way service is approached in too many of the world’s top hotels.
To clarify, service is part of the human interaction, in this case between guest and employee, along with the at-least-equally-important emotional intelligence, or guest engagement. Facilities do matter too, especially for the end-consumer, but less so in B2B assessments.
Over the past 21 months, I have visited about 400 of Europe’s best hotels and stayed at nearly 100 of them for up to three nights.
My travels took me to Paris, Mallorca, Bodrum, Rome, Munich, Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Riga, Zürich, Basel, Lake Garda, Venice, Amalfi, Capri, Tuscany, Florence, Portofino, Milan, Lake Como, Lake Maggiore, Porto, Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla, Marbella, St. Tropez, Cannes, Nice, Monaco, Ibiza, Sicilia, Puglia, Budapest, Paris, Madrid, Sicilia, Athens, Mykonos and Santorini. In addition, I counted four trips in the Alps covering the world’s top mountain lodges across Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and parts of France—as well as Marrakech, my only trip outside Europe.
My approach is more of a subtly intellectual academic and practical one rather than basking or indulging in luxury. I don’t brag about my stays on social media but prefer to stay behind the scenes.
If I understand it correctly, a true luxury hotel’s paramount objective is to deliver a one-of-a-kind experience to its demanding clientele. Providing a home-away-from-home experience that makes guests feel comfortable, at ease, and appreciated. Happy guests become repeat guests and, ideally, those who spread the word—which can be compared favourably to any (costly) image campaign.
Knowing the above, and being aware of the acquisition cost of such luxury guests, why wouldn’t quality be the number one priority for all hotels, or at least those that aspire to exceed? My sense from my recent travels is hoteliers’ current priority is sales at the expense of quality.
The trouble spot for hoteliers is...breakfast. Delivering a breakfast experience as opposed to just delivering breakfast. For the guest, breakfast is the start of a new day that sets the pace for that day and is frequented by most as it is typically included in the room rate or package.
During my hotel stays since August 2019 I have had two (good) breakfast experiences, at the Goring in London in January 2020, and at the Hotel de Crillon (Rosewood) in Paris in February 2022. To me, breakfast is the litmus test, a true reflection of a hotel’s general ability and willingness to deliver.
Many hoteliers “accuse” me of being very critical in my assessments. I frequently hear that the inspector of one large provider of traditional quality assurance found no fault in the way breakfast was served, while I came to very different conclusions. I have come to believe that too many hoteliers appear to live in a social-media fantasy world, becoming complacent with pandering mainly to influencers and bloggers, so constructive criticism is something an increasing number of hoteliers are no longer used to.
Any recurring service can be standardized, no doubt. While I am not a huge proponent of standardization as it fundamentally contradicts individualization and personalization, hotels are typically assessed by standardizing, well, just about everything. Despite this high degree of standardization, why is my breakfast experience still so flawed? Even if standardization were designed to cover the basics, why are even they missing all too often?
Upon check-out, my 100-dollar question to hoteliers typically is, would your employees still make (many) mistakes even if they were made aware that someone is coming to critique their performance? In other words, an overt instead of a mystery shopper? Their unanimous answer is: Yes! Isn’t that interesting, and very telling? Doesn’t it mean that they make mistakes anyway, no matter what, because they don’t recognize them as mistakes? In fact, they might be thinking they are doing the right thing. Oops! Is this an employee shortcoming or a management failure, such as the absence of the General Manager in the lobby and during breakfast? Or too many hotel openings too fast? Or Covid?
To sum it all up, at breakfast, I “experience” more or less the same shortcomings wherever I stay. Very predictable. Very mediocre.
Hoteliers typically are not aware of this level of mediocrity. They have become more used to being praised and accepting accolades. They don’t mind improving their offering but are not in favor of changing their approach. Of course, as always, exceptions prove the rule.
However, the other day in Paris, following breakfast, I had a great talk with one of the most seasoned hoteliers on the planet, telling me that it was easy to score high with a well-known rating agency, but unfortunately, it would by no means reflect reality. Oops. I guess we live in a “I don’t wanna know” world!
I am only a frequent traveler and observer who has detected certain patterns from which I draw my conclusions. My wish is that hoteliers start to replace their sales priority with their quality hat, at least from time to time, and that there would be ambitious hoteliers that truly want to break out of the mediocre uniformity to which they all seem to have become accustomed.
