Co-authored by Craig Coughlin GAICD CEO of LUXXE Outsourced Hotel Services and Mark Ronfeldt CEO of Daiwa Living Nesuto Holdings Nesuto Hotels & Apartment Hotels
As CEO’s we both know Hospitality has always been a people business.
What we are seeing, increasingly, is that delivering a great guest experience depends not simply on the strength of one hotel team, one department or one supplier, it relies on an entire ecosystem of people, partners, technology and operational processes all working together.
In many respects, we think hospitality has become the ultimate in team sports.
A guest checking into a hotel rarely sees the reality behind their experience. They don’t see the recruitment process, workforce planning, room allocations, housekeeping schedules, technology platforms, maintenance requirements or communication between operational partners.
They simply know whether their room is ready, does the team welcome them warmly, is the room clean and does their stay feel seamless.
That simplicity for the guest requires real collaboration behind the scenes and we all know that one challenge in one department can quickly become everyone’s challenge.
The interdependence across a hotel operation is perhaps most obvious when something doesn’t go according to plan, for example if a housekeeping team is under pressure and rooms cannot be turned around as quickly as anticipated, the impact doesn’t remain within housekeeping, it flows immediately to the hotel front office and guest relations teams and ultimately the disappointed guest and therefore the Hotel brand.
Front office teams may have guests waiting to check in. Operations teams need to manage expectations. Guest services may need to find alternative solutions. Revenue and reservations teams can also be affected when room availability changes. It is all a knock on effect, operationally. A disappointed guest is the beginning of a poor relationship and review.
From LUXXE’s perspective, the responsibility is to ensure our people, systems, training and communication allow our hotel partners to operate effectively.
From Nesuto’s perspective, the priority is the overall guest experience.
But ultimately, we are solving the same problem, together.
How do we work together to ensure the guest receives the experience they expect?
That is where strong partnerships become incredibly important.
The best partnerships are not transactional relationships where one party simply delivers a service to another. They are collaborative relationships where both businesses understand each other’s pressures, priorities and goals. All of us need to be accountable together to ensure success.
When that happens, problems are solved faster, communication improves and teams become much more resilient.
AI Is Affecting Every Part of Hospitality, Just Not in the Same Way
Artificial intelligence is now part of almost every conversation about the future of hospitality.
AI and automation can help businesses analyse information, improve productivity, streamline processes, communicate more efficiently and reduce administrative workloads.
However, one of the interesting things we are already seeing is that AI can affect different parts of the hospitality ecosystem in very different ways.
For an outsourced housekeeping business such as LUXXE, recruitment is a significant operational focus and AI has made it remarkably easy for candidates to produce extremely polished CVs and applications, on paper, candidates can appear exceptionally well suited to a position. The challenge comes when the recruitment team moves from the application to the conversation.
A beautifully written, AI-generated CV does not necessarily demonstrate someone’s communication skills, experience, personality or suitability for a guest-facing hospitality environment.
Technology can therefore improve one part of the recruitment process while simultaneously creating new challenges within another.
For hotel operators, AI creates a different set of questions.
How can technology improve efficiency without removing the human connection guests value?
How can we use better data and smarter systems to support teams rather than simply replace tasks?
And where does technology genuinely improve the guest experience?
These are questions every hospitality business will need to consider.
High-Tech Must Still Be High-Touch
There is sometimes a tendency to present technology and human service as competing ideas.
We don’t believe they need to be.
The future of hospitality should be both high-tech and high-touch.
Robotics, automation and AI can absolutely play a role in hotel operations. Technology might support housekeeping teams with repetitive tasks, improve workflow management, provide real-time information about room status or help teams allocate resources more efficiently.
But technology should ultimately create more opportunities for people to focus on the elements humans do best…
Conversation
Understanding
Problem solving
Anticipating guest needs
Creating genuine connections
A robot may be able to assist with part of an operational process, AI may help analyse information and software may help teams work faster, but hospitality still happens between people.
The opportunity is not to remove the human element, it is to use technology to give our people more time and capacity to deliver it.
Partnership Requires Transparency
Strong operational partnerships also depend on being prepared to have difficult conversations.
There will always be pressure points in hospitality:
Recruitment shortages.
Unexpected occupancy changes.
Guest expectations.
Technology challenges.
Cost pressures.
Operational disruptions.
The strongest partnerships are those where both sides can openly discuss these challenges rather than allowing them to become someone else’s problem.
If one partner is experiencing recruitment pressure, the hotel needs to understand what that might mean operationally.
If the hotel is anticipating an unusually busy period, service partners need visibility early enough to prepare.
If technology is being introduced, everyone involved in the guest journey needs to understand how it changes workflows.
Collaboration is strongest when information moves in both directions and we need to stop thinking in silos, hotels have traditionally been structured around departments:
Rooms. Housekeeping. Food and beverage. Sales. Revenue. Front office. Operations.
But guests do not experience departments, they experience a hotel.
That means the industry needs to increasingly think beyond organisational boundaries, in particular an outsourced team should not feel separate from the hotel team.
Technology partners need to understand operational realities and Hotel leaders need to understand the workforce challenges facing their suppliers.
And everyone needs to understand how their individual decisions affect the guest journey because when teams operate in silos, the guest eventually feels the gaps and when partners operate as one team, the experience becomes seamless.
People Remain Our Greatest Competitive Advantage
For all the discussion about AI, robotics and automation, hospitality continues to revolve around people, as an industry we can invest in smarter technology, stronger systems and more efficient processes and it should, but people are our priority for both of us.
But the businesses that succeed will be those that combine those investments with strong relationships – between leaders, between hotel teams and service partners and between employees. And, ultimately, relationships with guests.
The future of hospitality will undoubtedly be more technologically advanced but this also means it will also require greater collaboration.
Because no hotel, supplier, technology provider or operational partner delivers the end-to-end guest experience alone.
Hospitality really is a team sport. And the stronger the team, the stronger the guest experience.
#LUXXE #TheLUXXETouch #HospitalityLeadership #HotelOperations #OutsourcedServices