Because the emotional moment is what the guest remembers and retells, often for decades, and no audit, school or technology can produce it. The leaders I interviewed treat it as the difference between good and great, and as the most reliable marketing a property will ever have.
A luxury property can be graded on almost everything. Thread count, response times, the temperature of the soup, the number of seconds before the phone is answered. The one thing the audits cannot grade is whether anyone in the building made the guest feel something. In my conversations with eighty hoteliers and chefs, that ungradable quality was the one every subject described as the difference between good and great.
The reason is practical before it is sentimental. Consider what guests actually retell. Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris, told me about a solo business traveler, newly engaged, whose room the team filled with a hundred helium balloons, each carrying a photograph of her fiancé, while she was at dinner.
“Not only shocked but moved that we had gone above and beyond to touch her heart in a way that she will truly never forget.” Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris
That guest has told the story many times since. So has the couple who married on impulse at the Ladies Pavilion in Central Park, with the Mandarin Oriental’s chief concierge standing as their witness. So has the family whose thirteen year old got a slumber party in a Signature Suite with a popcorn machine and an ice cream cart. None of these moments were scripted. All of them registered with the guest as the property having paid attention closely enough to imagine something the guest had not yet articulated. The absence of the gesture is what the guest would have remembered. Its presence is what they tell their friends about for twenty years. The economics of that, honestly calculated, are absurd in the property’s favor.
The chefs frame it differently and mean the same thing. Patrick O’Connell of The Inn at Little Washington describes an evening at his restaurant as a stage set for a magical interlude out of time and place, where worldly cares can be suspended. The language is grand. The operating practice beneath it is the floor and the kitchen reading that one diner arrived exhausted and another arrived celebrating, and giving each a different evening. The emotional connection is the output. The noticing is the work.
There is a second reason emotional connection matters, and it concerns the team rather than the guest. Care runs in one direction through an operation. The leader who treats the team as the medium of the guest experience, who protects them from the abusive guest and the impatient owner, develops them and defends them when it counts, produces a team that extends the same care outward without being told. A kitchen run on fear cannot do this, because a frightened employee has part of their attention on the consequence and only part on the person in front of them. Eric Ripert’s rebuilding of the culture at Le Bernardin around the year 2000 is the book’s clearest demonstration. The warmth the restaurant is known for was not a happy accident of that change. It was what the change made possible.
The third reason is the one leaders tend to underestimate. Emotional connection is the only part of the experience that technology cannot replicate. Ralph Radtke, then general manager of Çırağan Palace Kempinski Istanbul, told me that technology must be carefully integrated into the guest experience, and only insofar as it adds to that experience rather than becoming an end in itself. A property that invests in systems at the expense of the people who notice will find it has automated the gradable parts and lost the part guests were paying for.
The conclusion the book draws is that personalization is the proof of attention, and care is the operating ethic rather than the marketing copy. A property that gets both right has a form of marketing that compounds for decades and costs, in most cases, almost nothing.
Chapter 8, The Human Touch, follows this through the stories at Le Royal Monceau and Mandarin Oriental, the conditions that let a team keep caring, the line between technology that helps and technology that erases, and what happens when the leader who embodies the standard is no longer in the room.