The other day I booked a room straight via a hotel’s website, no intermediary. Cost of the room night, several hundred Euros. When receiving the confirmation, I was informed I was being offered a small, complimentary bottle of water on arrival, showing the hotel’s appreciation for my direct booking. A small bottle of water! That is roughly 0,25 EUR in cost. A generous act? Or a rather affordable way of trying to encourage direct business?
I have decided to opt for the second alternative. First, a hotel of a certain category is supposed to offer complimentary water in every guest room, not so much as an act of generosity but as minimum quality standard. Second, the lack of marketing creativity trying to capture direct business in such a fashion seems unfit for the quality the hotel was trying to project.
From a certain level upwards, hotels are supposed to show genuine generosity towards their guests. Generosity of quality time spent with the guest, generosity in offering meaningful, complimentary details, generosity in creating personal and intimate moments, generosity by thinking out of the box to surprise and exceed expectations.
Spontaneous generosity should be part of our SOP’s and even more so when dealing with luxury boutique hotels where guests spend hundreds and even thousands of Euros a night. True generosity is not being talked about; it just happens when the occasion arises. It is silent and discrete; it occurs in the shadow and is always heartfelt. It makes those who deliver it proud and satisfied, and those who receive it recognized and valued. Therefore, it creates win-win situations. It is the pleasure of giving without receiving anything in return and goes far beyond the paying relation between a guest and an employee. It is added value in its purest form.
Generosity is a human quality that seems to vanish in many parts of our lives. However, we are very fortunate, as in our luxury boutique hotel cosmos we have opportunities to surprise our guests and to fulfill their deepest desire for recognition. Most of the time, the tangible cost is almost cero. It is our imagination, it is our attention-to-detail, our capacity to show empathy that makes all the difference. We should educate ourselves and our teams to always have that generosity-inducing empathy in our minds.
Generosity is close to magnanimity which seems more important in a hierarchical or B2B context. The other day I decided to terminate an association with a consulting company that had asked me to join forces with them. The people leading the company showed rather considerable room for improvement regarding their magnanimity towards other, including some of their clients, making me feel quite out of place. I prefer to be surrounded by people exuding generosity, magnanimity, and a certain human elegance. It is the emotions that move the world, in the consulting business and even more so in our magnificent hospitality universe. We enrich ourselves and others by caring, by creating positive emotions, lasting bonds that go beyond tangible fees or salaries. Let’s toast to the tangibles, loads of them, but above all, to a culture creating generosity and meaningful moments.