A hotel cannot deliver every standard with zero variance, but it can deliver two. Here is how to choose the guests your hotel is built for, the moments that matter most to them, and three moves that put your team's hours where those moments happen.
Your Hotel Is Built for Two Guests
Every hotel serves some guests better than others. The Guest Value Journey calls them Ideal Guest Profiles: the guests whose reason for travel and needs match what your hotel does best. Most hotels can serve two well. Three is ambitious. Four is a lack of focus.
Tuesday's post shows your revenue manager how to measure whether the hotel attracts them: A Full Hotel Can Still Be Full of the Wrong Guests. Your part comes before the measurement and after it. Before, you approve the two profiles. After, you protect them when the quarter closes weak and the team wants to fill the hotel with anyone who will come.
That second job is the harder one. A general manager who approves two profiles in January and chases volume in March has not chosen anything. The team notices the difference faster than the owner does.
Guests Remember Four or Five Moments
A stay holds hundreds of small interactions, and guests remember very few of them. The arrival and the first look at the room. The first night's sleep. Breakfast on the first morning. One interaction in the middle of the stay, at the restaurant, the spa or the concierge desk. The checkout.
Which of those moments matters most depends on the guest. The weekday business traveler wants keys in hand at the desk, a room quiet enough to sleep, and a breakfast she can finish in fifteen minutes. The couple on a weekend away wants a welcome that feels personal, a dinner table that was ready when they arrived, and a slow Sunday morning.
A hotel that tries to deliver all five moments perfectly for every guest ends up delivering all of them unevenly. Two moments delivered every time beat five moments delivered sometimes.
Put Your Hours Where Moments Happen
Choosing two moments is a staffing decision as much as a service one. The business hotel that knows its guests care about sleep and breakfast speed puts its labor there: enough hands on the breakfast line between seven and eight, and a housekeeping standard that checks every window seal and every curtain. It spends less everywhere the guest will not notice.
That is how a guest profile makes the hotel cheaper to run, not only better to stay in. Guests who match what the hotel was built for make fewer one-off requests and need fewer exceptions, and exceptions are the largest single drain on a team's productivity. The same logic runs through last week's post on planning the roster from the forecast: Your Housekeeping Team Never Sees Your Forecast.
Write the two moments down, train them, and check them. A moment that depends on whoever happens to be on shift is not a standard. It is luck.
Let the Front Line Fix It
Something goes wrong on roughly one stay in four, according to the Guest Value Journey whitepaper. The question is not whether problems happen. It is whether they are fixed before the guest writes the review.
Give your front line the right to solve a problem without asking anyone first: a drink at the bar, a late checkout, a better room, a handwritten note. Each of those costs the hotel very little on most nights. A guest whose problem was fixed quickly often rates the stay higher than a guest whose stay had no problem at all.
Log every fix on the guest's profile so the next stay starts with recognition rather than a repeat of the same mistake.
Three Moves for Monday
None of these needs a new system. Each needs a decision only you can make.
- Write one sentence for each of your two guest profiles with your revenue manager and sales lead, and ask three team members to repeat them back to you.
- Name the two moments that matter most to each profile, and walk them yourself on three different shifts this week.
- Tell the front desk what they may give a guest to fix a problem without asking, and put it in writing.
The second move usually shows the gap at once. The moment that works perfectly on your shift is often the one that slips on Sunday evening.
Demand Calendar is a total-revenue forecasting and profit system for hotels. It sits alongside your RMS and PMS, not instead of them.
Your guests will forget most of what your hotel does for them. Choose the two things they will remember, and make sure every shift delivers them.
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