Why hospitality is a beautiful profession

Hospitality Daily is a non-boring summary of stories for busy people who want to get better each day at providing hospitality.

Today, you’ll read about:

• Why hospitality is a beautiful profession (and why this matters for recruiting)

• Brand experience design

• The new version of WFH

Why hospitality is a beautiful profession

We need to help people understand the beauty of a career in hospitality if we are to attract the talent needed to serve our guests, Michael Hraba told me recently.

“I love hospitality because it’s about the people and the experience and knowing at the end of the day you’re really impacting and changing people’s lives. Whether you’re running a motel or a luxury resort, you can impact people’s lives and you can change them by teaching them little things, or showing them little things through amenities, or the stay, or the programming, or just the warmth of the hospitality. 

“Every day is new and different people, whether that’s a professional peer, executive committee, management team, employees, or whether that’s guests, new and different people, and new and different challenges.

“Everything about hospitality from day to day operations is about the process of working towards a common goal. All these people from different walks of life, different backgrounds, different belief systems have to come together no matter what, and work together as a team to create something special to actually hopefully change people’s lives, both on the employee side and guest side.

“As we all worked together through the pandemic, I was reminded of how special hospitality is. Even if they disagree with belief systems, or politics, or whatever, we’re all working together in a way that is very familial.” I’d like to see more people talking about this!

[read more]

Brand experience design

Have you ever visited a hotel website or saw any luxury product that made you feel:"I want this..."? That is not a coincidence. It’s triggered by carefully designed product presentations and brand experiences, tailored to your interests.

Daniel Diosi shares how you can go through this process. “Crafting a ‘wow’ hotel brand experience starts with understanding the desires of your target guest segments.”

As a first step, you need to think about what kind of people would appreciate your hotel product the most. Hotel marketing segmentation is a way of dividing potential guests into groups, based on a set of shared characteristics.

Basic marketing strategies will point to age and nationality. In reality, these are very irrelevant for branding and marketing communication purposes. Depending on your market and property type, you should define segments based on cultural affiliation, income, travel style, travel purpose, and general personality traits when creating these groups.

Your job at this stage is to identify which groups of guests would like your property the most, based on its location, features, facilities, and other unique variables proprietary for your hotel.

• Who would enjoy your hotel concept the most?

• Who would like the food in your restaurants?

• Who would like the design and decor of your rooms?

• For whom are the standards of your hotel suitable?

• Is the price suitable for your target groups of guests?

These questions cannot be answered by you, your owners, nor the hotel marketing team. You have to do market research.

[read more]

The new version of WFH: Work From Hotel

To appeal to new WFH travelers, some hotels have adapted by offering ideal working spaces and access to local coworking spots. Hilton for example has offered hotel rooms for guests to increase efficiency in their workday, and several hotels ran offers to allow business professionals to stay, work and play for an extended period of time.

Business travel is here to stay, says a new survey from Morning Brew. But the pandemic has pushed us to reconsider its purpose and pushed hotels to reconsider their role in travelers’ lives, placing even more importance on meeting both their emotional and functional needs and desires.

It can be summarized in three words: quality over quantity, as opportunities to travel become more meaningful and businesses are using those moments more intentionally. And there’s a very, very good chance it’ll have a lasting impact on what business travel looks like for years to come.

[read more]

Tweet of the day

If you’re working on something you’d like me to share here - or come across a story of someone providing exceptional hospitality - let me know by replying to this email ([email protected]).

If you enjoyed today’s update, please take a moment to forward this email to a friend or colleague. 

And that’s it, folks! Go out there and make someone’s day today.