The Business of Experience: McDaniel, CHA, on Creating Meaningful Guest Experiences in Hospitality

1. How much of an experience is about what happens and how much is about how the guest feels?

The guest remembers the feeling longer than the sequence of events. A perfectly clean room is expected. A technically correct check-in is expected. What sticks is whether somebody noticed you were exhausted, fixed a problem without making you fight for it, remembered why you were there, or simply made the place feel easy. Hotels can become so focused on executing the checklist that we forget the checklist is not the experience. It is the price of admission.

2. Where should technology disappear completely from the guest experience?

Everywhere the guest should be dealing with a person. Technology should remove friction, not hospitality. Use it to eliminate paperwork, speed up requests, organize information and help employees know what they need to know. But if I have to scan three QR codes, download an app and argue with a chatbot to get a towel, we have not innovated. We have outsourced the front desk to the guest.

3. What is one mistake hospitality businesses make when trying too hard to design an experience?

Trying to make every moment memorable. Nobody wants a theatrical production every time they walk through the lobby. Great hospitality creates the conditions for memorable moments and then gives good people enough freedom to recognize them. Some of the best guest experiences I have seen in 38 years were not in a brand standard, an SOP or a marketing deck. An employee simply paid attention.

4. What is the difference between an experience that creates value for the guest and one that simply creates cost for the operator?

The guest has to notice it — or at least feel it. Hotels spend astonishing amounts of money on things that photograph beautifully and contribute almost nothing to the stay. Meanwhile, a fast cup of coffee, a room ready when promised, a bartender who remembers your drink, or an engineer who fixes the air-conditioning quickly can create enormous value at very little cost. Experience is not synonymous with expense.

5. Can AI create meaningful personalization, or will the most memorable moments always require human intuition?

AI can make the employee smarter and faster. It can surface preferences, recognize patterns and remove a lot of administrative work. But knowing that a guest ordered Chardonnay last time is data. Knowing that tonight may not be the night to mention it is hospitality. I am bullish on AI behind the curtain. I am much more cautious about putting it between the guest and the person who should be taking care of them.

6. What will guests expect five years from now that they do not necessarily expect today?

Less friction and more humanity. That sounds contradictory, but I think it is exactly where we are headed. Guests will expect the transactional parts of a hotel stay to become almost effortless. At the same time, as technology becomes more common everywhere else, genuine human attention will become more valuable, not less. The winning hotels will automate the things nobody came to a hotel to experience and protect the things only people can do well.