Roundtable: “The changing face of luxury service”

On the panel:

Francesco Sardelli, general manager, The Hari

Jorge de Jesus, general manager, Beaverbrook

Emmanuele Selvaggi, hotel manager, Rosewood London

Ed Hooper, CEO, LQA
Moderated by Eamonn Crowe

Luxury service roundtable discussion

What does good service look like in a luxury hotel setting today?

Jorge: For us at Beaverbrook, it’s about seeing the person beyond the guest. We do things to remove the formality, such as giving our team the license to address guests by their first names when appropriate. We have found when that happens, the interaction changes completely to a much more personal, friendly level and you invite guests to co-create their stay.

We talk a lot about experiences, and we have a lot of amazing experiences at Beaverbrook, but the ones that keep people coming back are the ones you’ve built together with the guests because every person is different. A lot of what we do with our team now is more about presence rather than perfection. In fact, we are willing to give away perfection if presence is there.

Francesco: At The Hari, our culture is about allowing the team to be themselves. We don’t want them to follow a script, we give some of the staff the opportunity to dress how they want–we don’t tell them what to say or how to do it, we allow them to be them.
That trickles down into how the team interacts with the guests.

For us, it’s extremely important we create that connection with the guest and all my front office and concierge are required to touch base with the guests at some point during their stay and create a personal relationship. We do this because we have learned that someone will give you feedback as a friend, but will complain as an enemy.

Emmanuele: I’m running a 308-room hotel, so it’s luxury at a very different scale. While personalisation is always at the forefront, for me the key factor for luxury is consistency. We need to keep that up because it’s 308 rooms, which means, at some stage, 500 plus guests. Consistency allows us to create the foundation to move towards that personalised experience we want to give to guests.

I hear a lot about storytelling, but my team hears from me another version, which is story-listening. I always tell my team, whenever you ask a question to a guest, you need to listen to that answer carefully. Through this, we can create moments of magic for guests in a very natural way, by listening to what they say and doing small things that cost nothing.

The team also knows they don’t need my permission for these small gestures. They need to use their common sense and understand they cannot buy a Ferrari for a guest, but they can certainly buy a toy for a young child staying with their parents.

How can GMs empower team members to feel confident in making decisions around service and going the extra mile for guests?

Ed: Empowerment and risk-taking has to, naturally, also give the opportunity for things to go wrong and fail. There are people who talk about empowerment, but then also immediately talk about people being responsible for something if it goes wrong–that’s not empowerment. We all fail, we fail all the time. We make mistakes all the time, constantly, it’s life, and as long as you learn from those mistakes, then that’s really empowering. The room for reflection is a really valuable point and I don’t think we do it enough.

Jorge: It’s hard to embed it into the culture. A year ago, we changed our end of day meetings to create a lot more room for reflection, asking our team ‘what have you noticed today?’ For some people, it’s quite natural to spot if a guest is stressed or unhappy, but for others it can be a struggle. If you do it enough times, people start really paying attention when they are having those interactions with guests and that’s how you start building that emotional intelligence.

Has the shift in service style within luxury hotels also changed the way you approach recruitment?

Ed: That idea of ‘hiring the right people’ is interesting because I think sometimes we give up on people a bit too quickly in this industry. People say, ‘oh, they don’t have it, they’re not going to learn.’ How do you know if you don’t try? When do we teach emotional intelligence? We talk about it, all of us, being very important, and it is fundamental.

If you want to break the change in guest profile down into one simple word, it is variation now. It used to be very monochromatic in the past and now it’s hugely variable. To get all those guests what they want, you have to be able to read a person.

Jorge: I just had a very interesting experience with hiring. We were hiring for a critical role in our front line, and our HR team sent me this brilliant CV, someone that had 20 odd years experience in that role. I wasn’t sold though, because we hire only on attitude. To me, attitude is experience in the making.

My GM was nothing like me, his job was nothing like mine. So why are we hiring people with 30 years experience in something, when hospitality has evolved so much? I had the interview with the experienced candidate and realised there was a lot of talking, but not a lot of listening. We ended up recruiting someone with very little experience, but an understanding of luxury and a lot of appetite to learn what luxury service and experience should be.

Ed: That nuance is really hard, that experience versus attitude. I interview everyone we hire, absolutely everyone. By the time they get to me, they’ve been through our director, our commercial director, HR team… by the time they come to me, they’re good enough to do the job so I just care if they’re a good human being. That’s the only thing I’m looking for. Are you a good human? Because if you’re a good human, we can teach you the rest. If you’re not a good human, it’s not going to work.

Emmanuele: I don’t think you can teach emotional intelligence, but you need to provide an environment that’s fertile enough that allows them to get that emotional intelligence out to their fullest potential.

It obviously depends as well on the kind of role you’re hiring. If I’m hiring a director of revenue, I need that person to have experience! But I hired an assistant manager at the desk who had very little experience, she was a teacher, and then she realised that wasn’t her calling. I’ll never forget how excited I was by her interview and she proved me right. She is one of the strongest people we have, and it’s just because of who she is. When she was telling me, ‘I’ve never worked with XYZ,’ I didn’t care, because for me it’s all about the attitude. It’s our job to then make sure that attitude has room to grow to its full potential.

Ed: We also have to take the fear out of it. The last thing you want to do with someone who has potential is say to them, ‘right, you have to learn all this stuff before you talk to guests.’ The first thing you should teach anybody is how to interact with guests. It’s interesting you say you can’t teach emotional intelligence, because generally speaking, everyone has some emotional intelligence. They can have a normal conversation with you and honestly, I think you can teach them how to let it out. The number of hoteliers that tell me, ‘I just can’t find someone with emotional intelligence,’ is ridiculous. We all have it.

Francesco: It’s a risk analysis. When our team members come and tell me they’d like to do something, I think ‘okay, what’s the impact on the brand? What’s the impact on the guest? What’s the impact on the financials?’

If they’re small, all the way across, allow them to go and try it. That’s the most important part, allowing them to do something. At a previous hotel of mine, a marketing manager wanted to put on a themed afternoon tea tied to a popular fairytale. It cost £3k to put on and made £1.8m in revenue. The risk of that investment turned into a big financial reward, which everyone was part of the success of. It’s about allowing your team to go and take those risks, but the most important part is the brand. Protect the brand first and foremost, everything else you can fix.

Francesco: The thing I always tell my team is to imagine that your mother-in-law is coming to your house, what would you do? You buy flowers, you clean the house. When you open the door to them, how do you interact with them? That’s your emotional intelligence. Apply that to everybody that comes through the door in the hotel. It’s not rocket science, just be yourself and enhance it a bit.

Jorge: It’s about not thinking of the person in front of you as a guest, but as a person. You can tell if someone wants to be on a first name basis. At our private members club, every single member of staff addresses our members by their first name, and I would actually get a complaint if we used their last name.

Ed: Asking permission to use someone’s first name, the psychology of that is actually about giving them permission to be themselves and breaking that barrier. 10 or 15 years ago, we had very opulent, deferential service and treated every guest like they owned the place. Now, it’s like they’re part of the team… that’s what they’re buying when they go and stay at a hotel, they’re buying permission to be in this stratosphere. They don’t want to own the hotel, they want to be part of it.

How can hotels use training to aid career progression, and work out where someone might be headed in their professional journey?

Emmanuele: I don’t think there’s a specific training for it. What we do at Rosewood is cross exposure: allowing somebody from one department to experience another department which can have zero ties to the one they belong to. For example, I had my guest services associate decide to spend some time with our accounts people. She had nothing to do with accounts in her job, but that’s what she wanted to learn, and now she is actively looking to move into the finance department because that’s where she found her calling.

Spending two or three shifts could seriously open up somebody’s eyes in a world that before was not even contemplated. That’s what we try to do… it’s giving them more opportunities, rather than creating a target training.

Ed: It also gives them a ‘why’. If you go work in accounts or in F&B, you learn why it’s important to do this thing in this way. Understanding that cross foundation piece is really key.

The training we do at LQA is continuing to evolve. In fact, we did as much training in February this year as we did in the whole of 2019, so it’s gone completely nuts. We also just opened Academy by LQA in Lisbon, [A fully immersive, simulated luxury hotel environment complete with reception area, bar, lounge, restaurant, and bedroom].

The Academy investment is all about sticking people together in a place that is not their hotel. It’s about creating a place that feels like a hotel, but there’s no pressure, because there’s no one there. They can mess around and have fun, but it’s all experiential learning. On the final day, they have to present what they’re going to take back to the hotels, that’s the final exercise. They work in cross-department groups, so they get that cross-foundational understanding.

We are living in an era of ultra-luxury hotels. However, is there a case to argue that a good stay is now less about facilities and more about creating a memorable experience for guests?

Jorge: The facilities are expected anyway because you charge a premium… I can’t see in the luxury space a place where the product would not be relevant. I would feel very nervous just to rely on experiences and I think the product needs to evolve.

However, sense of place is also important and you need to think about how do you get people to come the first time, and how do you get them to keep coming? To me, the product and personalisation need to go hand in hand. I can’t see a time where one is more important than the other.

Ed: When you see a product, you feel an experience, and you associate what you think it’s going to feel like to be in that space. Ultimately though, there are far fewer truly unique properties around the world than we think. There is a bar you have to be at from a product level as a luxury hotel. You can’t be below that bar, but once you’re above that bar, I honestly think it becomes all about the experience.

Emmanuele: My team knows that I often use controversial analogies, but I see this as being like when you go on a date. The first thing that attracts you to that person is the physical attraction you have. Then all of a sudden you get to discover who they are, and that makes you fall in love with them. It’s very similar in our world.

You get to see this beautiful building and these amazing facilities, and you are like, ‘oh, my God, I cannot wait to get there.’ But then it’s the people there that make you fall in love with the place.

The beauty of the building or the brand story, I still feel those things are a fundamental part of the experience for hotel guests, but there is so much more behind it and it’s our job to show people that.

Where do you see the future of luxury service going and how can UK hotels make sure they’re at the forefront?

Francesco: The hospitality will remain, the basics will always be there. It’s the emotional connection that you need to have with your guests. You never leave thinking, ‘oh, that was a beautiful room,’ you always leave a place thinking, ‘that was a nice experience.’ It’s more the experience than what is the package, because one without the other doesn’t work.

Ed: As you go up the value chain with hotels, it’s going to continue to become about the identity of that hotel. If you do not have identity as a hotel, you will increasingly struggle with competition because you’ll end up in a market where there’s just more and more coming in.

It’s having an identity, sticking to that identity, and being yourself and letting guests come in and feel that identity, and not trying to be everything to everybody.

Jorge: Being at Beaverbrook, I’ve developed this huge passion for the English countryside, I think it’s hugely unappreciated.

We’re an English Hotel, our owners are English, everything we do is about an English way of life. I’m not English, I just met my first love and stuck around!

When talking about identity though, the thing that sets Beaverbrook apart from other hotels is that we’re an English hotel and everything we do is about the English way of life.There’s a lot to be said about British hospitality–when we talk about luxury, everyone thinks about the Middle East and Asia, and no doubt it is there but it’s also right here. We have a tremendous opportunity over the next five to 10 years to really make our brand of hospitality different and authentic. I think there’s huge value in that.

Emmanuele: For me, it’s about being in the UK, whether you are proud of being a British hotel, or whether you’re grateful for being housed here in this beautiful country, this is the one thing that we need to celebrate, because if we want to continue getting that incredible influx of guests coming in, then we need to celebrate where we are.

For us at Rosewood, the sense of place is one of the biggest things. I always say if you came to the hotel blindfolded and you took the blindfold off you only have to look around for a few seconds and you’ll know you’re in London because of all the elements that remind you of it. It’s not going to be a huge Union Flag in front of you, but there are small elements that remind you of where you are and that’s very important. We need to be grateful to be housed here and be proud to be here, and at that point create that connection with the country and celebrate British hospitality.

by Eamonn Crowe