Leaders on service recovery

Service recovery was the discipline the hoteliers and chefs discussed least in public and most precisely when asked. The people collected here are the ones Chapter 10 of The Luxury of Attention is built from. Alexander Pichel gave me the sequence: listen without prejudice, apologize honestly, then offer a solution. Anneke Brown gave the rule most properties get wrong: correct it and compensate without question. Gerrit Graef called negative feedback the breakfast of champions. Axel Bethke described how to turn an angry guest around swiftly and completely. Richard Ekkebus, from the kitchen at Amber, said the restaurant takes constructive comments to heart.

Two ideas run through all of them. The first is speed, and speed depends on authority: none of the recovery sequences described here survive an approval chain, so the operations that recover well are the ones that have already handed the front line the right to fix things. The second is that a complaint is information before it is a problem. The leaders here keep the causes, share them with the people who can fix them, and treat the guest who complains as someone doing the property a service.

The profiles below give each person’s role, the recovery practice they describe, and the lines from the books that the chapter rests on.