Anticipatory service is knowing what a guest needs before they have asked, built from attention paid to that specific person across hours, days or years. The hoteliers I interviewed call it the highest form of service, and it runs on four rungs from reacting well to creating what the guest never imagined.
Most definitions of good service describe how well a property responds. Anticipation is a different discipline. In the operating definition the people I interviewed practice, it is attention applied to a specific person across time, with the patience to know who they are before they have asked for anything. Luc Delafosse, then managing director of Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, gave me the sentence the whole chapter rests on.
“Hospitality is the craft of knowing in advance what guests need and want” Luc Delafosse, then managing director of Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills
The clause that matters is the first one. Knowing in advance. Executing a request precisely is competence. Responding graciously is competence. Anticipation is the work that happens in the hours and days before the guest has thought to ask, and it rests on what Delafosse described as a relationship between colleagues and guests that has to be nurtured before, during and after every visit.
Across the interviews, the discipline sorts into four rungs of an ascending ladder. Most properties live on the first or second. The operations in the book reach the third and fourth on a regular basis.
The first rung is reactive. The guest asks; the property delivers well. The breakfast order is accurate, the room change is efficient, the late checkout is granted. The guest leaves satisfied and has no particular reason to choose this property over the next one.
The second rung is proactive. The team notices a need before the guest voices it and acts. The housekeeper who sees the local excursions guide on the bedside table and passes the observation to the concierge, so that a tailored itinerary is waiting before the guest asks, is working here. This rung requires two things. The team has been trained to notice, and the team has been given the authority to act on what they notice without coming back for permission. Without both, the observation dies at the staff member’s station.
The third rung is predictive. The property uses accumulated data and pattern recognition to anticipate needs the guest has not expressed and may not have realized they have. Krister Svensson, then general manager of The St. Regis Bangkok, described Marriott International tracking preferences across six thousand hotels, so that a stay in Singapore three years ago informs a pillow, a dietary note and an in room snack on arrival in Bangkok. Pinar Kartal Timer’s team at Pera Palace would research an arriving writer and leave a chocolate box embossed with their latest novel’s cover. The predictive rung needs real infrastructure and a leader who has decided the investment is worth it.
The fourth rung is generative. The property creates an experience the guest did not know to want. Ayman Gharib, then general manager of Raffles Dubai and Sofitel Dubai Wafi, flew a regular guest’s butler to another Raffles property overseas, so that the familiar face was waiting at the door of a hotel the guest had never visited. Nobody could have requested that, because nobody had imagined it.
Amit Majumder, then general manager of Jumeirah Vittaveli in the Maldives, gave me the line that captures the top of the ladder.
“True luxury is having what you’re merely thinking about be presented to you before you voice that desire.” Amit Majumder, then general manager of Jumeirah Vittaveli, Maldives
The practical note for a leader is that the rungs have to be climbed in order. The proactive rung needs trained noticing and empowered staff. The predictive rung needs a CRM that captures the right things and a team that keeps it current. The generative rung needs a culture in which the team feels free to propose something absurd, because the absurd will sometimes be the right answer. Properties that try to skip a rung end up running an expensive system that produces, in practice, a stay no different from a less ambitious competitor’s.
Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, sets out the guest profile, the art of observation, the Anticipation Ladder in full, the chef’s version of the same discipline, and the line between recognition and surveillance.