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At Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Summit, hospitality leaders explained why authentic care and personalized moments are redefining great service.
What travelers consider “good service” is an ever-changing art. Flawless routines and loads of amenities were once seen as the ultimate pillars of hospitality. But a panel of travel experts at Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Summit suggested that these days it’s about something new: making guests feel seen and valued through bespoke personalization and human connections.
“We don’t talk about service, we talk about care,” Singita CEO Jo Bailes said of his Africa luxury safari and ecotourism company’s philosophy. “Care, as a definition, has so much more depth and meaning to it.”
How that care is delivered is what’s evolving. Once upon a time, the industry was guided by the phrase “the customer is always right,” but that old adage grew into often-formulaic experiences as a way to ensure brand consistency. These days, the “magic”—as several called it—lives in the in-betweens.
“Clients can sniff out generic from a mile away,” travel advisor Karen Magee, president of Valerie Wilson Travel by Chase Travel explained, adding that travelers don’t like experiences that feel “prescriptive.”
To counter that by-the-numbers feeling, travel advisors are homing in on guests’ preferences. For example, a family visiting Rome had a young child who loved Lego, so the advisor arranged to have a Lego set of the Trevi Fountain delivered to their hotel room. Not only was it a surprise-and-delight moment when the child received the gift, but the whole family was able to prolong the joy of their vacation by taking the souvenir back home.
However, the challenge then comes in being able to deliver individualized experiences like that to each and every guest, especially as the number of travelers continues to grow. “We need to be able to create systems that allow us to take and support more customers, but always keeping in mind the fact that we need to go above and beyond to make it feel really personalized,” Magee said.
That’s why recruiting the right team matters so much. “Our mission is really to remove all the friction, so that [our guests] can truly be present—and that is something that we see through human connection with our staff members,” Hyatt’s Inclusive Collection’s vice president of global brands Ana Tomicevic said of scaling quality service to the company’s 150 all-inclusive resorts. “That’s really where the magic happens.”
Case in point: earlier this summer, a couple was seen at one of its Dominican Republic resorts’ pools with a banner and beach-cover ups with the name and face of their staff member Alexander printed on it. As it turned out, the travelers had been visiting the resort bi-annually for the last five years, saying the only reason they return is for Alexander. He had become like family to them, so they wanted to celebrate him.
“That story blew me away because it just talks about the beauty of our people and that point of care,” she said. “It’s really how we make people feel special.” To put it more formulaically, she said they talk about it being an equation of “empathy plus action,” making sure to involve the local culture.
And it works: 60 percent of their guest surveys mention a staff member by name, she said, punctuating just how crucial the individualized touchpoints are.
However, that kind of genuine care isn’t a skill that can be trained. “You really are looking for the talent out there … who are going to take a deep responsibility in taking care of those customers and making sure they’re safe and hopefully having an incredible trip,” Magee said. They need to have those instincts to embody their philosophy: “We create for consistency, but like to plan for creativity.”
Hoshino Resorts CEO Yoshiharu Hoshino added that level of service comes from getting the employees involved, so they have a vested interest, even within the organizational culture. That means that they provide all the information—from financial statements to customer satisfaction reports—to team members at every level. “If you don’t have the information, you have a disadvantage in participating in discussions,” he said. “Our main purpose is to recruit people and maintain them, so we really want to make sure they enjoy working in the long term.”
It’s through that loyalty that the care is fostered and relayed to the travelers. After all, actor Richard E. Grant, who hosts the podcast Hotels with History, said that of all the luxury hotels he’s experienced, “The thing I’m struck by over and over again is people want and respond to a feeling of being people valued and feeling like they’re having an authentic experience.”
During a trip to the Amalfi Coast, he stayed with three sets of billionaires on each of their boats in the same week—and they each took him to the same restaurant, Lo Scoglio. “Each of them went into the kitchen, met the chef, met the family, and were given boxes of vegetables, and each one of them said, ‘This is an experience that nobody else gets,’” he marveled, of the team’s ability to recreate that genuine sense of elevated access.
But pulling back, it’s all about understanding how to make the guests feel that authenticity, however it’s executed. Panel moderator Paul Brady, Travel + Leisure’s news director, highlighted that sense of value through a few of New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer’s quotes, including “Policies are nothing more than guidelines to be broken for the benefit of our guests.”
As Grant said: “If somebody says, ‘It’s not a problem, I will sort this out for you.’ That, to me, is gold dust as a human being.”
Read the original article on Travel & Leisure
