Hotelier Perspectives

I read Jan Carlzon’s book, Moments of Truth, many years ago. It was one of the most powerful customer service and experience books at the time, and the content aligned perfectly with my idea of creating Moments of Magic for our customers. Carlzon’s definition of the Moment of Truth was:

Indigenous tourism is a burgeoning pillar within Canadian travel, growing at four times the pace of other tourism sectors and contributing more than $1.7 billion to the GDP from over 1,875 businesses (prior to the pandemic). And despite the crushing impact of the past two years, there is more interest than ever from Indigenous entrepreneurs to take their place in the Canadian hospitality industry. Supporting these ventures in turn presents lucrative opportunities for investors, brands and management companies.

Setting up a right profitability management approach starts with understanding your market and benchmarking against the right hotels. It’s also a way to attract the right guests. One of the best ways to do that is identifying the hotels that are most like your own vis-à-vis key count, F&B services and outlets, conference space and other offered amenities. In the hospitality industry, choosing a compset if the first step toward a winning market-share formula.

We’ve all experienced it. We’ve called the customer support line, and a pre-recorded message answers stating, “Press one for this, two for that, etc., etc. Well, it happened to me again – the third time this week – and this is how it went down.

As a hotel aficionado and frequent resident at the world’s best hotels, my impression is that today’s consumer is less loyal to a luxury hospitality brand than an attractive hotel property in a desirable location run by genuinely friendly and warmhearted people who are in the experience-providing business. With my QA hat on, being able to enjoy an authentic luxury experience takes both hardware and software, facilities and soft skills, to be on a high level, as opposed to just one of them.

For centuries, the local Salinan Indian tribe enjoyed the hot mineral water that bubbled up in what is now the center of Paso Robles. They named it “Heaven’s Spot” because of the curative powers of the sulphur springs. When the Franciscan padres arrived, the tribes’ population was greatly reduced in just four generations. The Spanish colonial government intended for their California missions to be temporary institutions which they mistakenly thought would quickly convert the Indians to Catholicism and teach them Spanish and farming methods.

No employee should be treated poorly by customers. I feel bad for the people who work at the airport luggage office. The office is usually next to the baggage carousel, and the airline employees who work there interact with one passenger after another, all with the same complaint: My luggage is lost!

Tom Magnuson and his wife, Melissa, now spend part of the year in London and part of it at Lake Pend Oreille. Magnuson Hotels’ U.S. headquarters remains in Spokane WA.

Traditional marketing is akin to throwing bottles in an ocean of information, hoping that people will receive the message inside, find it attractive and place an order for more bottles. In other words, traditional marketing is a highly uncertain activity, which can rapidly become an expensive endeavour.

Are “trend tours” the new solution for restaurant brands seeking to capture the finicky post-Covid consumer? Defined as highly tailored get-togethers for restaurant pros seeking the latest in menu innovation, these Enhanced Experiences, offered by CSSI, can solve for the rise in consumer dining expectations over the past couple of years.