The best hotels notice the specific guest in front of them and act on what they notice, while everyone else delivers templated personalization. The difference is a team hired for a quality that cannot be taught, protected by a leader who walks the floor, and a standard held every day rather than audited once a year.
The honest answer is uncomfortable for anyone who has spent a career on brand standards. The world’s best hotels and the merely good ones have, for the most part, the same marble, the same thread count, the same welcome champagne and the same note under the door at turndown. Those are table stakes at the top of the market, and the guest has stopped noticing them. What the guest notices is whether the hotel noticed them.
The hoteliers I interviewed described this in almost identical terms across continents. A good hotel personalizes from a template: the guest profile says birthday, so a cake appears. A great hotel registers the particular person in the room, works out what they actually need at that moment, and acts on it in a way the template could never have produced. Susanne Hatje, then general manager of Mandarin Oriental, New York, told me about a couple who decided on a whim to marry at the Ladies Pavilion in Central Park.
“We quickly arranged for a last-minute Justice of the Peace, a photographer and a horse and carriage. Our chief concierge, Kenneth Abisror, served as the couple’s witness.” Susanne Hatje, then General Manager, Mandarin Oriental, New York
Any competent hotel can arrange a wedding. The detail that separates Mandarin Oriental is the named concierge standing as witness. The couple will remember him for the rest of their lives, and they will tell the story at every dinner party for twenty years. Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris, told a related story about a recently engaged guest traveling alone on business who missed her fiancé. The team filled her room, while she was at dinner, with a hundred helium balloons, each carrying his photograph. On paper the gesture is absurd. In the room it was exactly right, because the team had identified the specific source of her loneliness instead of generically pampering a solo traveler.
Graham Ledger, then general manager of Singita across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, described a quieter version. A guest who regularly orders a gin and tonic finds the drink in their drink box on the game drive, or a surprise gin bar waiting at the bush dinner. The data point is ordinary. The response is built for that property and would be wrong in a city hotel. Specificity of response is the whole difference.
None of this is possible without the people, which is the second thing that separates the best. The quality these gestures require cannot be trained into someone who lacks it. Kaupp put it in the cleanest sentence anyone gave me.
“Today, we can teach someone to shake the perfect martini or to read a profit and loss statement, but what we cannot teach is the human touch, and being a people person.” Aaron Kaupp, then General Manager, Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris
So the best hotels hire for that quality first and teach everything else afterward. Then they protect it. The hoteliers in this book were unanimous that the human touch erodes under fear, under exhaustion and under leaders who fail to shield their teams from difficult guests and impatient owners. A hotel that hires brilliantly and operates badly ends up, within two years, with the team it would have had if it had done the opposite.
The third separator is the standard, and who holds it. In a great hotel the general manager is on the floor, catching what the department heads are too close to see, every day. The standard is defended in person rather than audited by a mystery shopper once a quarter. Everything the guest experiences as effortless is the product of that daily presence.
Chapter 8, The Human Touch, takes up what the quality is, how the best operators hire for it and what erodes it. Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, follows the discipline of anticipation that makes the gestures above reliable rather than lucky.