How is GUEST EXPERIENCE influenced by hotel BACKEND? Guests always feel chaos in the background!

What goes on inside is FELT outside. By your guests. NOT slightly but NOTABLY.

Organisation, communication, department cooperation, company culture, leadership, execution, EVERYTHING! will be reflected in REAL guest experience. Guest experience is end product and as such it is HEAVILY influenced by business backend.

What seems like a minor fault to you is eventually a huge failure for a guest! It effects your reputation, reviews, marketing, branding, everything! It's a CHAIN of reactions.

You WANT to be smarter than that.

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Video Transcript:

Hello everyone. Welcome to Remarkable Boutique Hotels where we talk about outstanding experiences and everything that leads to them.

Today we’ll talk about how every part of of business backend like organisation, communication, culture, understanding of common goals and so on, is connected to guest experience. I’ll give some specific examples showing how these things appear in practice. Let’s dive in.

Many hotel owners assume guest experience in their hotel is great or the way they intended it to be. Most of you have clear picture in your head of how it should look like, but the problem is that picture isn’t what happens in reality. Why is that? Well, guest experience is not only about interactions or delivering up to standards, it’s more than that. Guest experience is everything that you offer and deliver to a guest including the way you do it, meaning how you show up and how you run the business.

For example, communication between maintenance team, housekeeping and IT department might look like it's out of scope when talking about guest experience but it’s absolutely not. Let’s say a Bluetooth speaker in one room is broken and maintenance team replaces it with another speaker which happens to be of another brand. So, someone should tell housekeeping and IT sector to remove or update the note both in paper and in iPad where it says that that particular speaker from that particular brand can be bought by a guest when in fact there is no such speaker in the room any more. Moreover, when maintenance team doesn’t know this clearly, they may even leave that brand for good. And the matter doesn’t even end here because for example the question could be why there is another brand in the supply at all and how the procurement process looks like, and those kinds of questions definitely influence your numbers in business.

Furthermore, having that particular brand in rooms is probably part of hotel’s branding so it’s very likely a guest will notice it and see it as hotel’s failure because if you communicate something and are kind of proud of it, in this case having speaker from a well know brand, make sure you actually have it. In case you’re thinking - common that can’t be big issue, you’re right, guests don’t seem to care much for such things. But this will stay in their head subconsciously as kind of sloppy behaviour, and remember how you do anything is how you do everything, so they might find themselves doubting in some other services as well, since trust was already broken. Even if it’s just slightly, this red flag will show up as they holding back and being a bit more reserved when you’re giving your best to make an impression.

So, it’s easy to take things for granted when they are obvious for you. You just assume everyone understands some things but not everyone are thinking like you do or have the same inputs you do. We tend to say something is common sense when it’s not. So, it’s not enough that everyone are doing their job diligently. People need context, inputs and outputs and someone to connect those. That’s when they can outperform. Also when it becomes busy, your team needs help such as procedures, reminders, briefings, creative directions, and so on, because even the best can’t think of every detail every time, we need guidance like supporting structure, so we can give our best on top of that.

For example, having hardworking efficient housekeeping team sounds great but let’s say a morning team never takes a note of a guest not watching tv therefore finding it pulled back into wall or putting a specific item like ceramic bottle holder which was placed on a night table by evening team back on its original place. That way, that perfect service is not so perfect anymore but annoying to a guest. Your mission should be to understand your guest’s routines not to do your procedures perfectly.

Ideally, morning team should notice these details and pass information, maybe you have ways to clarify it in the mean time so that turndown team during evening service doesn’t do it again and doesn’t disturb actual guest’s evening routines. Maybe instead you play music they like or gift them a book of a genre they like if that is what you discovered they prefer. Or maybe they do use these things but just like to put them back, but it’s still something to be confirmed and guests will appreciate. So that’s putting a real guest experience over procedures. That’s an example of using a context rather then just doing day to day business without major issues. Hotel operations and standards should be in service of a relevant specific quality which leads to satisfied guests because it depends on a specific guest. And this doesn’t even require extra work if, this is important if, if your guests are your ideal guests, the ones who share your values and enjoy your hotel concept. Because in this case you’re accommodating their needs and wants which are closely related to your hotel’s identity and character.

So, it's not enough that you and your team are putting lots of effort. Guests are not paying for your effort but for the value you produce for them, which can be below guests’ expectations, just fine or outstanding and extraordinary.

Again still, maybe you’re thinking, you have all those departments running, everyone doing their job the best they can, you have procedures in place, even regular meetings going on, maybe even you are on the floor most of the time, guests looking normal and everything is as usual.

And look, that’s fine with me, but here we’re discussing outstanding guest experiences, providing above and beyond service and charging appropriately for it. So, if that’s where you see your hotel, you need to question if those meetings are efficient or a waste of time, if procedures are centered around real life situations and specific guest or just smartly written documents no one finds useful or if you in general have built a brand which is reliable but also doesn’t stand out among other hotels.

It’s not like you are doing wrong things, but not every effort is what creates value for guests. It’s one of those moments when you realise your team looks busy, when instead they should work smarter not harder.

For example, in a busy dining room, servers will tend to move faster and serve everyone efficiently when instead they are not providing enough attention to each table, they are bringing in the impatience and rush in the dining room instead of flow and confidence that everything is under control. That doesn’t mean it’s truly like that but that’s how it looks and that’s what’s important for guest’s experience.

Notice, I am not saying that getting food quickly to table, once it’s ready is not imperative. It is, but also rushing the experience and bringing adrenaline in dining room is not what your guests want to experience. In order to look calm while going through let’s call it controlled chaos takes great coordination across all the teams, professional skills of your people, genuine care for guest experience but prior that understanding what that guest experience is supposed to look like, which also means knowing your hotel’s values and concept. So all these are inner systems that work as enablers for that smooth pleasant guest experience.

You and your team have two perspectives to focus on and that is frontend and backend. Guests directly see your frontend, things like steps in service, service style, but also behaviour, tension, expertise or being lost in whatever one’s doing. But, that frontend relies on your backend. And it doesn’t matter how hard you are actually working if you are not bringing value to a guest. So, you can’t have stable success if you don’t have both of these perspectives figured out so they complement each other. You want to think in terms of added value for a guest and then create seamless execution.

Let me repeat that again, added value for guests not just business and then supporting systems in backend for seamless execution. This will create an effect of guests getting huge value immediately and effortlessly. This is a super important equation for boutique hotels.

So, when you are able to provide outstanding guest experience consistently without drama, pressure and chaos, that means you’ve also created proven systems that support you and your team throughout time which is how extraordinary sustainable businesses are managed.

Uh, I think that was plenty for today, go and implement something from this today. So, until next occasion, have a beautiful experiences my friends.

Thank you for listening. Here at Remarkable Boutique Hotels, we want your hotel to be worth every penny and every second of your guests. Schedule a discovery call to find more about our remarkable methodology which is unique in the whole hospitality industry. I would love to hear your hotel story. See you there.