Authentic, unscripted customer service
Scripted service, pretensions and formality, the white-gloved, ‘tea at the Plaza’ style of customer service, are too mothball-scented for today’s hospitality customers, including the important Millennial generation of travelers. ‘We don’t want an imitation of a waiter’—with white towel on the arm and a faux-French accent—‘we want the genuine article,’ says Patrick O’Connell, the restaurateur and hotelier who helms the Inn at Little Washington [in Virginia].
Eye-level design and furnishings
The eye-level approach to design and furnishings supports better customer engagement. As Mark Harmon, founder of Auberge Resorts, says: ‘Customers have a visceral Pavlovian reaction when they walk up to a high desk with employees lined up behind it. They instantly feel like they’re going to get hammered. So get your people out from behind the counter.’
Localizing the hospitality experience
One signifier of an authentic customer experience is what can be called localization, or terroir, to use the French word for the convergence of factors—geography, climate, and so forth—that go into making local wine or produce and that is applicable in a broader context as well. While 30 years ago it might have been okay for the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead to look like the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel, today [the brand] takes the opposite approach: its Kyoto property, for example, is designed so that it couldn’t be anywhere else in the world but Kyoto, [with] lighting fixtures that are lanterns made by a small, local, ninth-generation family business.
Multigenerational and special-interest group travel
Customers are more often than ever coming together in groups other than romantic couples and nuclear families to consume travel, lodging, and food service—from marathon runners to hunters, religious groups to salsa dancers. One in six Americans live in a multigenerational household, [which] are traveling together more and more.
The ‘alone together,’ latte-and-laptop traveler
Guests want to be around other people, though not necessarily with them: the paradoxical desire for a communal setting in which to do private work. As designer David Rockwell puts it, today’s customers ‘want different options to work and socialize,’ and ‘don’t want what they do to be predetermined by inflexible architecture.’
