My job as a hospitality business convention speaker and coaching facilitator affords alternatives to talk with lodging business leaders from a broad spectrum of administration firms, manufacturers, and independents. Based mostly on my observations, I feel there are quite a lot of leaders, together with some with many years of expertise who work at top-tier firms, who don’t totally perceive the distinction between “hospitality” and “visitor service.”
I typically hear these phrases used interchangeably, but whereas they’re associated, and whereas visitor satisfaction requires each, they’re basically totally different ideas. Understanding the distinction, and having the ability to convey this to frontline employees, are important for taking each to the following degree at your resort, firm or resort.
So What IS The Distinction?
Offering “visitor service” is extra about delivering experiences that at the very least meet, and hopefully exceed, visitors’ expectations. Foundationally, this requires offering protected, clear, up to date, and comfy lodging. On high of that, wonderful visitor service requires utilizing communications necessities that rise above merely being well mannered. A couple of examples can be:
- Holding eye contact with visitors lengthy sufficient to change smiles.
- Utilizing open physique language.
- Excellence in phone communications. (A constructive opening greeting, asking permission to position them on maintain, supervising name transfers, and ending the decision by providing further help, restating the caller’s title, and thanking them.)
- Utilizing visitor names conversationally all through their keep.
- Utilizing the language of hospitality resembling saying “Permit me to verify on that…” not “I’ll must verify on that…,” “Might I recommend that you simply…” as an alternative of “You’ll must…,” and saying “You’re most welcome” as an alternative of “No downside.”
- Expressing empathy and apologizing when issues go mistaken.
And but I’d argue that it’s solely attainable for a resort colleague to make use of all these communications strategies however fully fall brief on delivering hospitality. In our every day lives, I’m certain we have now all had customer support experiences the place the affiliate mentioned the entire proper issues, however who spoke in a manner that felt scripted, robotic and disingenuous.
Particular to inns, I typically discover that some inns, most frequently in upscale and luxurious sectors, grow to be so obsessive about passing a FORBES, AAA, or model inspection that they over-emphasize these “visitor service strategies” to the purpose the place it comes throughout as “scripted politeness” and feels obsequious to visitors.
Visitor Providers Abilities Are Demonstrative;
Heartfelt Hospitality Is Philosophical
Enlightened leaders know that hospitality is, at its core, a philosophy for dwelling way more so than it’s a script or listing of “communications requirements” to be checked off in a thriller shopper’s inspection report.
To start out, let’s take a look at the basis of the phrase “hospitality” itself, which is derived from the Latin phrase hospes, which is a phrase having the diametric meanings of “visitor” and “host.” Dictionary definitions of the phrase “hospitality” typically embody some model of receiving visitors in a manner that’s heat, beneficiant, and pleasant.
For many years now in my on-site hospitality coaching workshops, I typically ask contributors to work in small teams and to formulate one collective definition. Their outcomes are all the time fascinating and insightful, however the perfect one but got here out of a gaggle a few years in the past that got here up with this definition: “Hospitality means caring about, in addition to for, others.”
Within the resort business, once we care “for” others, we principally do our jobs and supply visitor service. We clear the rooms, repair what’s damaged, and supply a room key in change for his or her bank card. But once we care “about” our visitors, we perceive that the particular person on the opposite facet of the desk, counter, cellphone name, or e mail change is an actual particular person going by way of a uniquely private journey expertise. We take time to think about that they may be on the town for a marriage, a birthday, or a trip, but in addition it may be for a funeral, memorial service, or at the beginning or finish of a hospital keep. They may be on the town on enterprise to entertain gross sales prospects at fancy eating places, rent new employees, or attend firm conferences, but in addition it may be to testify in a lawsuit, shut a department workplace, or finalize a divorce continuing.
Those that have enrolled their entrance desk employees in KTN’s “Licensed within the Coronary heart of Hospitality” program will acknowledge one other definition of hospitality we use, which is “Hospitality is the supply of human kindness, particularly to strangers.”
Nevertheless, maybe the easiest definition I’ve ever encountered was provided by a real business icon, Howard Feiertag, who was my private mentor and good friend for 34 years till he handed away final March at age 93. Many readers will know Howard as a co-worker from the years he spent as a corporate-level hotelier or his years on the convention talking circuit. Maybe he’s finest often called Professor Feiertag, having joined Virginia Tech as an Adjunct Professor in 1990 and the place he nonetheless taught lessons at age 93.
In my view, Howard gave the perfect and positively the pithiest definition ever, when he made this remark at a banquet in his honor: “Hospitality is making individuals really feel good,” Howard mentioned that night time, including, “and once we make them really feel good it makes YOU really feel good too!” Word: You possibly can watch this phase of Howard’s speech on the 6:20 timestamp on this YouTube hyperlink https://youtu.be/5JPa78aDZWM
And so resort leaders, at your subsequent employees assembly, administration convention, or govt committee gathering, take a number of moments to ask your leaders to think about the true which means of hospitality, guaranteeing to distinguish it from the idea of visitor service strategies.
