Spiritual Hospitality
As I was looking at the landscape artist's proposal for renewing our landscape around the hotel and to upgrade the gardens, suddendly a thought struck me. Why do guests stay in 5 star hotels ? They want a 'home away from home' , a clean place, a posh ambience and crisp service. Is that all ? They can choose to stay any other hotel then ,why choose a 5 star internationally branded hotel. Maybe , they are looking at good food served with a smile and friendly people also. So what else ? Every hotel worth its buck provides that. How can a hotel be different and how can it leave an impression on the guest -like a real WOW experience.
Most of the Group hotels have perfected the science of service. They have guest service programs like the 'Spirit to Serve' program in the Mariotts, 'Yes I Can' guest service program in the Radissons, 'Ladies & Gentlemen serving Ladies & Gentlemen' in the Ritz Carlton Hotels etc . These program are SOP driven , step by step programs which advocate 5 steps of serivce or 7 techiques or 10 principles or some other way of making the whole guest satisfaction concept a 'by the book' driven excercise. This traditional thinking and methods influence most of the hospitality industry today. Then what will open the doors to levels of guest experience much higher than 5-stars. What is that which is unclonable, differntiated from competition and which will leave an lasting impression on a guest experience. As a successful 5 star hotel we have huge efficiencies in guest satisfaction but we want to go to the next level. The answer is to provide guests a heart-warming, loving and caring spirit that makes the guests wish that time would stand still; not because of the material splendour, which anyone with money can create, but because of the love, care, warmth, and compassion that the staff exude, particularly through their eyes and body language. Unfortunately, this cannot be created through a efficient, correct and friendly service only. We need to look at the hotel not as an extention of the outside world but as an "oasis of peace" the guests enter after a hard day work. This can not only be created with the ambience but with the people who are saturating the hotel with a heart-warming spirit of love, compassion, warmth, care, and empathy.To create this spirit you have to do things differently.
We must first teach our staff to love themselves first. This is not as simple or as silly as it sounds. How many hotels who want their staff to show love to the guests teach them how to love themselves first? It is pointless simply telling staff, "You must love yourself first." That achieves little or nothing. But we could teach them easy 3-minute meditations that will touch their heart and develop the feeling of love for oneself. This will start to changing the thought -energy and vibrations that they send out. There is nothing strange about this. You must have gone into a room before and felt positive or negative about the room or people without knowing why. We sometimes feel that the other person is not 'vibing' with us. This is because thoughts are simply vibrating energy ,infact the whole body is made of energy and one can influence the body's energy field to create a loving guest experience . But it has to start from the top management belief and that means do we should have love, compassion and care as part of our mission statement and then use these concepts in the service design .
How do we do this:
To take this forward we should employ the right kind of music, stories , incidents and combinations of these with certain 5-minute meditations to reach the hearts of the employees so that they want to show more love, care, warmth, empathy, and compassion.
We can also create in employees a feeling of being so happy by practising showing gratitude with emotion in a certain way. It helps their positive emotiional state and will increase the desire to make people happy. We can have them spend 3-5 minutes doing this in a briefing before going out to serve guests.
Employees often carry emotional baggage with them from home to work. We need to remove these negative energies in the pre -briefing sessions as worries and stresses cannot help the emloyee create a wonderful guest experience. There are simple 2 -3 minute meditations to stop negative thoughts.
Another essential element is to change all of the SOP manuals so that they are aligned with the guest experience at the level of Spiritual Hospitality. Every step in each skill should include at least one of the core values that underpin the new vision statement.
Example:"Address the guest in a heart-warming and caring tone with a warm smile and warm eye-contact that say, "I'm so pleased to see you." Soften your voice to make it sound warmer and let the person hear in the tone of your voice that you care from the heart. The guest will feel your warmth and respond to it. Your attitude and manner should be welcoming as this will make the guest feel happy."
Teach and take sessions for employees on law of attraction from Rhonda Bryne's "Secret". "ask, believe, receive" — is the essence of the Law of Attraction.
Make the employees perform the SOP's at100% efficiencybut add the spice of the 'serve love' porgram
Empathy is an important quality to develop in the employees because the guest experience will require employees to be able to read and understand the guests intuitively, and to show that they are in-tune with them
Developing the intuition of the employees supports the development of empathy, and is a very important part of service at the level of creating truly memorable experiences and beyond because it increases the employee’s feeling about the guests, and enables them to know what they should do to make each guest happy. By developing their intuition and by encouraging employees to use it, to act upon their feelings, and to show empathy with compassion, they will create more varied memorable experiences
Another element to add to this service is mystery or magic where guest should feel that the employees are reading their minds and know what they like and want. This can be developed with the development of intuition.
To summarize this, we can change the guest experience by the way we develop the spiritual values and elements of the guest experience. There is some work being done on this by Peter Macalpine in Thailand and in the west but we are in a better position to embrace this as Indians we are taught spirituality and values from young and understand the nuances of Dharma and Karma.
As I was looking at the landscape artist's proposal for renewing our landscape around the hotel and to upgrade the gardens, suddendly a thought struck me. Why do guests stay in 5 star hotels ? They want a 'home away from home' , a clean place, a posh ambience and crisp service. Is that all ? They can choose to stay any other hotel then ,why choose a 5 star internationally branded hotel. Maybe , they are looking at good food served with a smile and friendly people also. So what else ? Every hotel worth its buck provides that. How can a hotel be different and how can it leave an impression on the guest -like a real WOW experience.
Most of the Group hotels have perfected the science of service. They have guest service programs like the 'Spirit to Serve' program in the Mariotts, 'Yes I Can' guest service program in the Radissons, 'Ladies & Gentlemen serving Ladies & Gentlemen' in the Ritz Carlton Hotels etc . These program are SOP driven , step by step programs which advocate 5 steps of serivce or 7 techiques or 10 principles or some other way of making the whole guest satisfaction concept a 'by the book' driven excercise. This traditional thinking and methods influence most of the hospitality industry today. Then what will open the doors to levels of guest experience much higher than 5-stars. What is that which is unclonable, differntiated from competition and which will leave an lasting impression on a guest experience. As a successful 5 star hotel we have huge efficiencies in guest satisfaction but we want to go to the next level. The answer is to provide guests a heart-warming, loving and caring spirit that makes the guests wish that time would stand still; not because of the material splendour, which anyone with money can create, but because of the love, care, warmth, and compassion that the staff exude, particularly through their eyes and body language. Unfortunately, this cannot be created through a efficient, correct and friendly service only. We need to look at the hotel not as an extention of the outside world but as an "oasis of peace" the guests enter after a hard day work. This can not only be created with the ambience but with the people who are saturating the hotel with a heart-warming spirit of love, compassion, warmth, care, and empathy.To create this spirit you have to do things differently.
We must first teach our staff to love themselves first. This is not as simple or as silly as it sounds. How many hotels who want their staff to show love to the guests teach them how to love themselves first? It is pointless simply telling staff, "You must love yourself first." That achieves little or nothing. But we could teach them easy 3-minute meditations that will touch their heart and develop the feeling of love for oneself. This will start to changing the thought -energy and vibrations that they send out. There is nothing strange about this. You must have gone into a room before and felt positive or negative about the room or people without knowing why. We sometimes feel that the other person is not 'vibing' with us. This is because thoughts are simply vibrating energy ,infact the whole body is made of energy and one can influence the body's energy field to create a loving guest experience . But it has to start from the top management belief and that means do we should have love, compassion and care as part of our mission statement and then use these concepts in the service design .
How do we do this:
To take this forward we should employ the right kind of music, stories , incidents and combinations of these with certain 5-minute meditations to reach the hearts of the employees so that they want to show more love, care, warmth, empathy, and compassion.
We can also create in employees a feeling of being so happy by practising showing gratitude with emotion in a certain way. It helps their positive emotiional state and will increase the desire to make people happy. We can have them spend 3-5 minutes doing this in a briefing before going out to serve guests.
Employees often carry emotional baggage with them from home to work. We need to remove these negative energies in the pre -briefing sessions as worries and stresses cannot help the emloyee create a wonderful guest experience. There are simple 2 -3 minute meditations to stop negative thoughts.
Another essential element is to change all of the SOP manuals so that they are aligned with the guest experience at the level of Spiritual Hospitality. Every step in each skill should include at least one of the core values that underpin the new vision statement.
Example:"Address the guest in a heart-warming and caring tone with a warm smile and warm eye-contact that say, "I'm so pleased to see you." Soften your voice to make it sound warmer and let the person hear in the tone of your voice that you care from the heart. The guest will feel your warmth and respond to it. Your attitude and manner should be welcoming as this will make the guest feel happy."
Teach and take sessions for employees on law of attraction from Rhonda Bryne's "Secret". "ask, believe, receive" — is the essence of the Law of Attraction.
Make the employees perform the SOP's at100% efficiencybut add the spice of the 'serve love' porgram
Empathy is an important quality to develop in the employees because the guest experience will require employees to be able to read and understand the guests intuitively, and to show that they are in-tune with them
Developing the intuition of the employees supports the development of empathy, and is a very important part of service at the level of creating truly memorable experiences and beyond because it increases the employee’s feeling about the guests, and enables them to know what they should do to make each guest happy. By developing their intuition and by encouraging employees to use it, to act upon their feelings, and to show empathy with compassion, they will create more varied memorable experiences
Another element to add to this service is mystery or magic where guest should feel that the employees are reading their minds and know what they like and want. This can be developed with the development of intuition.
To summarize this, we can change the guest experience by the way we develop the spiritual values and elements of the guest experience. There is some work being done on this by Peter Macalpine in Thailand and in the west but we are in a better position to embrace this as Indians we are taught spirituality and values from young and understand the nuances of Dharma and Karma.
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