Anticipation is attention applied to a specific guest across hours, days or years, with the patience to know what they will need before they have thought to ask. It is the most concrete form of the luxury of attention, and in the language of the operators in the book it is the highest form of service.
Luc Delafosse, then at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, gave me the chapter’s working definition when he described hospitality as the craft of knowing in advance what guests need and want. The clause that matters is knowing in advance. Responding well to a request is competence, and almost any good property can manage it. Anticipation is what happens in the hours and days before the request, and the hoteliers I interviewed have spent a century building a vocabulary for it, from the guest profile to the pre arrival email to the quiet validation at check in of what the file thinks it knows. Axel Bethke, who ran Qasr Al Sarab in the Abu Dhabi desert when we spoke, was candid about how hard the discipline is to install.
“Nevertheless, it is difficult to teach anticipation and even more difficult to execute it consistently.” Axel Bethke, then General Manager, Qasr Al Sarab Desert Resort by Anantara
In a hotel the discipline can cost nothing. At Six Senses Douro Valley a young American guest with a serious peanut allergy sat down nervously to her first meal and was told the kitchen already knew. As she left, the server handed her a small card he had written in Portuguese, explaining her allergy, so that she could eat in any restaurant in the valley without beginning the conversation again. The property had read a need she had beyond its own walls, and the card brought her to tears. In a kitchen the same discipline runs through the pre service briefing, where the chef, the maître d’ and the sommelier go through the book table by table: the anniversary at table four will be acknowledged with dessert, and the regular at table six who always pushes the protein will find the proportion quietly inverted without being asked.
Anticipation is often confused with personalization, and the difference is what the chapter is about. Personalization is a system that stores a preference. Anticipation is a person deciding what to do with it, and when to do nothing. A guest history is a snapshot, and the guest who has changed since their last visit will find any reference to the old version of themselves jarring. The property that reveals how much it has researched someone produces unease rather than delight. The most careful operators are notably restrained about what they show, and the guest experiences a room that is simply right without being able to say how.
What the idea asks of a leader is to build the conditions in which noticing is valued and acted on: a team trained to observe, a system that captures the right things, the authority for a staff member to act without coming back for permission, and a culture in which someone can propose flying a guest’s regular butler to another country because the absurd will sometimes be the right answer.
The idea runs through Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, and is set up in Chapter 8, The Human Touch, and tested in Chapter 10, The Recovery, which is about what a property does when anticipation fails.