ÐßÐßÊÓƵ

Transcript

Why talk about Wimbledon
 
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another Matt Talk. This week, I wanna talk about a topic that makes me uncomfortable because I am not known for talking about sports, but I actually think that, you know, looking at what's happening at Wimbledon and how they run that organization through the years, but also how they're also leaning into innovation, actually, it's a really good representation of the hotel world and some of the lessons that we can take from it. So I'm going to dive into the uncomfortable today by talking about sports, and I'm sure a lot of my colleagues will be laughing that I talk about sports because I make fun of people that use sport references in work.
 
But I grew up playing a lot of tennis. I played tennis four or five times a week, and I wasn't a very particularly good tennis player. I wasn't also terrible, but I, you know, I was part of the group of the good players, but I was the worst of the good players. And it really, you know, it also, like, reflects on how I go about life.
 
I try and surround myself with amazing talent. What we do at ÐßÐßÊÓƵ today, you know, I'm surrounded by specialists in their fields who make me slightly uncomfortable, and they push me up because I learn so much from surrounding myself with great talents. And that is what I learned early on in life that by being surrounded by these amazing tennis players, and I was the worst of the worst in that group. And I lost, most of my matches I
 
lost, but I loved it. I loved being surrounded by amazing talent. So that's why I'm leaning into a sports reference kind of Matt Talk this week, but I'll link it back to hotels and what can we learn from how Wimbledon operates and how tennis operates in our hotel world. I hope you enjoy this.

Chapter
The power of flawless service under pressure
 
Right. My first sports reference is the power of flawless service under pressure. And if you look at Wimbledon or you look at tennis, you've got these people around the court. You've got the people that pick up the balls, the boys and girls, and then you've got the line judges that stand there.
 
And if you imagine, they're standing behind the tennis player, and they are about to see a ball come towards them that's being served with, like, an incredible speed, but they don't flinch. And I think that's kind of a good metaphor for what happens in hotels. We know that it's gonna get really busy at five or six in the evening on a Monday night in a corporate hotel. You know that these corporates are all walking in at the same time.
 
And, you know, it's organized chaos most of the time because you know it's going to get busy, and the good hotels are prepared for it. The bad hotels are those hotels where people take photos of their queues and they complain about the mess in the lobby. But mess is part of life because you can't control when guests walk in, but what you can control is how you anticipate and jump into that. So if you know that Monday night or the Sunday after breakfast is usually one of those big checkout days in city center hotels with a lot of leisure.
 
So that Sunday midday, when people are checking out, are a huge mess. And what you can do as a hotel is really map out the entire week. And this is a thing that we do often at ÐßÐßÊÓƵ, where we create a timeline and we say, okay. Right.
 
This is the Monday through Sunday night. And where are the peak periods in our system, for example? So we think about when the peaks of check-in and check-out are, and how do we diffuse some of that. And if you think that your peak is, you know, for check-in time is like a six o'clock on a Monday, but then you've got these big troughs after that as well.
 
And we try and make sure that we cut the peaks and the troughs to a really stable middle. And you do that through, for example, getting more customers to check in online, meaning that they can pass through the reception much faster. Having kiosks so that you can actually direct guests to the kiosk so your staff doesn't need to be trained on the check-in procedure. You can direct them straight to the kiosk.
 
And kiosks can serve many more guests simultaneously because it doesn't cost that much to have a few kiosks around. But you can also have the kiosk in staff mode. So you can even have untrained staff members from the restaurant that jump in, grab a tablet, and doing some of the check-ins directly on the tablet in the lobby. And it's really mapping out that entire end-to-end guest journey and understanding through the reporting which are historically the biggest peaks and troughs, and how do you plan your breaks and the staffing levels and who's on staff in other outlets that you can call in at those specific times.
 
And I think that's really, you know, when there's a lot of chaos, like when you're anticipating it, you're actually thriving and guests will see that, yes, it was busy, but the way that I still got service at the same time is incredibly impressive. And that's what you see at a Wimbledon. Like, it is a high pressure game, but at the same time, everything works really smoothly because they thought deeply about the interactions, about how the show runs. And the preparation is really critical to the success of Wimbledon, but also of your hotel.

Chapter
Anticipation is everything
 
The second rule is anticipation is everything. Once the tennis player serves their ball, that's step one. But they're already in their head thinking what's the most likely next move that their counterpart is doing. So the first thing is they move back to Centre Court so that they're in the most ideal position for whatever is going to happen.
 
But by anticipating what the most likely next move is, they are very likely to be successful in the second move that they make. This is what we often forget in hotels. So once we got the guests to the room, we move on to the next thing. But should we be anticipating what the guest is most likely next to do so that you can create an even better experience for them?
 
And I think that this is where the opportunity lies. So I remember when I was a trainee, I was nineteen years old, and I went to Scotland. I worked at a castle in a private members club as a butler for a while. I wore kilts and everything, it was a whole thing.
 
And James, the other butler, and, yes, that was his real name, told me that once a guest finishes two thirds of their drink, just bring them another drink. Even though, yes, there's cost involved, but it is more about the guest experience and the anticipation of it and the surprise elements because that never happens. That will set the tone for the next experience. He was so right.
 
As in when I started doing that, you could see the surprised faces of guests that I had anticipated. I'd already watched what was going on, and I'd anticipated their need. And this never happens in any restaurant or place because there's a cost attached to it. But most of the guests will take that drink.
 
And I think we need to think much more, what's the next step of the guests. So once you've checked in and you walk the guests to the elevator, not pointing to the elevator, you walk them to the elevator, you ask them, do you have any plans for tonight? Or what are your plans whilst you're in town? Or asking them whether they, you know, what time are they departing so you can prepare for their departure in the best way, and that might lead to a late check-out upsell, for example.
 
But it's most important that you ask the question because most of the time you regurgitate the facilities, you point to the elevator and you move on to the next guest. But that's where the experience lacks. But this is also where the greatest upsell opportunity is when you learn what the guest is going to do and anticipate how you can service that as a hotelier. And this requires a lot of training.
 
You'd need a manager who walks the talk, who's upfront, showing the right example. But this is some of the most powerful service elements that can drive some of the most powerful revenue uplifts as well for the hotel. So anticipation is everything.

Chapter
Tradition meets modern expectations
 
So the third area is tradition meets modern expectations. So if I think about Wimbledon, I think about luxury, and I think about tradition. You know, there's dress codes involved. You've got royal families attending, and a lot of that tradition is really key to what makes Wimbledon a really special, special event.
 
But at the same time, they haven't got stuck in the past. Right? In the past, they didn't have roofs. When it rains, they had to stop the match.
 
There was no lights to light up the courts so that at night you had to stop. And a lot of these things, you know, are associated with Wimbledon, but they have done a lot of innovation throughout the years. The most visible one is obviously a retractable roof on center court so that you can continue playing because there's you know, you don't wanna stop the match because you've got a whole audience. You can't just pause the match anymore.
 
So they added a retractable roof whilst retaining tradition. A major innovation has been electronic ticketing so that you can get guests in the court much more seamlessly, rather than having humans cut tickets, which is a nice experience, but it doesn't scale well and it requires a lot of humans. And that reflects on what happens in a reception. If you think what they did this year, Wimbledon introduced AI line judges so that they use AI to make a judgment whether the ball was in or out.
 
And we used humans for that before, but AI is just better. And what I love is that they retain the tradition and the flare of Wimbledon whilst at the same time they lean into innovation.
 
If you think about hotels, a lot of traditional hoteliers are resisting, for example, a kiosk check-in or an online check-in because they want to have this really personal experience. But, actually, I think, you know, is asking for someone's passport and credit card details creating that experience? Yes, it's a touchpoint, but it's not an experience.
 
And maybe if we can help automate a lot of those parts of the journey, you can have, you can retrain your staff or you can rehire, you know, people that are really good at that. Instead of the skill set of learning legacy systems, hire for personality, people that understand how to drive experiences and thus drive revenue. And this is really where you can still be a fabulous luxury hotel with a lot of tradition. You can be a beautiful castle hotel whilst you also lean into the innovation. As long as you think through the end-to-end experience that the technology should not be intrusive. It should be beautifully built into the workflows, and it should be additive instead of reductive to the experience. And if you have that in mind as you redesign your end-to-end guest experience through technology, I think you're on the right track to be like Wimbledon to retain tradition and fabulousness, whilst you also lean into efficiency and driving better service.

Chapter
 The invisible team behind the stars
 
Number four, the invisible team behind the stars. And I struggle to name you tennis players because I don't watch sports, but I know that Rafael Nadal, I think, is one of the major players. And we all look at him as the talent, which he is, but he can only be as successful as he is if he has an amazing team of people around him. You think about his trainer, you've got the coach, you've got the nutritionists, you've got the massage therapist.
 
There are so many people that make him successful, but he wouldn't be successful if it wasn't for that team. And it's the same if you think about a hotel where the front of house is the most visible. Right? We all think about the receptionists, the waiters.
 
But when you go back of house, there's an entire factory of people that are working really hard to make it successful. And often we forget to innovate their workflows.
 
And I'll give you a few examples. So if you think about housekeeping, still today, I often go, before I meet a customer, I'll run them a housekeeping report and I'll say, are you aware that most of your rooms return back to operation between two and four in the afternoon? Meaning that housekeeping inspects all of those rooms between two and four in the afternoon. Do all of your housekeepers clean between those two hours only, or have you just not enabled them technologically to inspect those rooms throughout the day?
 
And that is why we tell guests to leave their luggage and come back, because the rooms might be clean. It's just that the housekeeping department has not been technologically enabled to return them into operation. And it's the same if you think about other back office functions like maintenance. Right?
 
When people see something broken, they write it down on a piece of paper, and then, hopefully, that piece of paper at some point gets logged into a system that gets handed over to maintenance. Why not allow everyone in the hotel to snap a photo of the thing that's wrong and upload it straight to maintenance through a shared app, for example? And that's one of those major things that you can do. The accounting department is often highly under-innovated, right?
 
If I see a hotel where they're stapling receipts to bills, I know that there is an accountant that is manually verifying every amount in those receipts to their bank statements, etc, because you shouldn't have to staple anything, because you should trust the digital tools and the reporting that you have. And accountants shouldn't have to go receipt by receipts to add up their revenues at the end of the day. And all of that is also innovation that drives the front of house experience. And without us really innovating and investing into systems for back office team members, the front of house experience is never going to be that smooth.
 
The other day I was staying in a beautiful luxury hotel in the UK in the countryside. And at some point I had locked the safe, but I don't remember the code. I accidentally pressed lock before I set the code. So it was someone else's code.
 
So I called reception and said, can someone come and open the safe for us? And within two hours, no one came. So we went to bed. And then the next day, we went back to reception again, and we asked, can somebody open the safe?
 
And again, on the second day, nobody came. And on the third day, you know, my anger started building. I was thinking, I need the access to the safe. My stuff is in there.
 
And this really showed the disjointed experience of technology between the reception and between the security departments that had to come to the room when I was in the room. And it felt like such a small thing that they got wrong. And it's the thing I end up talking about. It isn't the great fabulous restaurant and the great spa.
 
It's the disjointed guest experience that I experienced on the back of house with the security department because they weren't enabled through technology.
 
And that's why it is important to think through all of your workflows and all of your guest flows through a system and making sure that every department is working on an integrated and automated system.

Chapter
Emotional highs and emotional lows
 
Number five, emotional highs and emotional lows. You can very quickly go from, you know, winning a beautiful point to then losing five points. And we as spectators go through emotional highs and lows. And as part of that, you have to learn as a team to very quickly adapt to mood swings that happen in the hotel.
 
Like, I talked about the experience at this hotel. I had a fabulous experience at the spa. It was honestly one of the best spas I'd ever been in. But then the issue with the safe became this thing that I, you know, that was really nagging throughout.
 
And at some point, I went to reception and said, I can no longer wait in my room because I want to experience your hotel. But I understand that I have to be in the room for security to be opening the safe because I have to be there to make sure that everything is safe. And I said, I really want someone to come. And then it took another day before that got resolved.
 
That would have been the moment for them to jump into it and to say, sorry about that. And to anticipate, like, saying, I saw that you used this bar. I'm so sorry for this experience. Can I give you a free pass to this bar?
 
Or something anticipating it. And that's one of the hardest things is the anticipation. I wasn't looking for something for free. I was just looking for access to the safe.
 
But at some point, it's escalated to a point where I was looking for some kind of compensation or some way that the hotel showed that they actually cared. But it was the lack of care, the lack of apology saying, I'm so sorry. I recognize that we failed you on this area. And that they jumped into that.
 
That was the thing that hurts. And we have to learn to teach our staff to recognize when something is about to escalate or when something's escalated. How do we anticipate it? Because dealing with guest complaints is one of the scariest things.
 
I've been working in hotels for many years, and I remember when I was put in my first duty manager shift, I was freaked out because I was so worried that a guest would complain. And I've learned through the years that one of the most important things is not to offer things for free. It's to listen, to listen deeply, to acknowledge what they said, and then to apologize profusely. And often that is enough.
 
The guest wants to be heard, wants to see that you've heard them, and you will take that seriously. And to apologize profusely saying, I'm so sorry that this happened. Like, I will make this my mission to make sure that this doesn't happen in the future. And they're not looking for any compensation.
 
They want to just be listened to because that's what great service is.
 
But this is a skill set that we have to teach our team members. It is incredibly terrifying for a young person to get a complaint and not know what to do. The first thing you do is give things away for free, but it is often not what the guest is wanting. So these emotional highs and lows will happen.
 
Every single hotel in the world will have great moments that are often offsets against some bad service moments that just happen when you have so many humans involved into it. Service just breaks down. It is how you teach your team to deal with those moments that is showing you what the greatest outcome is. So emotional high highs and lows and dealing with those.

Chapter
Serving as an art form
 
Right. And my sixth Wimbledon tennis related kind of pun towards hospitality is serving as an art form. The serve is the area where I failed the most because I just wasn't great at getting speed behind the ball. And often that was why I was on the back foot from the moment they served.
 
So if I was the person serving, that was definitely a game I would lose. I'd know I'd lose about fifty percent of the games already. So it was more for me to win some of the games where I wasn't serving, but I'd already lost on the outset because I didn't know how to serve well. And it became this thing that drove real fear in me because I was like, I don't know how to serve.
 
And then in my head, it got worse and worse. And this is what is holding people back because no one should be worried about that first welcome experience. Like, we should lean into it. We need to teach people to get really comfortable.
 
I should have just rehearsed the serve over and over and over until I got really good at it, but I didn't because I didn't like it, and then I shied away from it. And the first experience in a hotel is so, so critical. You know, what are all the senses of a guest walking in? You know, I often walk into a hotel with my luggage, and then there's no one to greet me at the door, and then I queue up at a reception desk.
 
And that isn't stimulating the right senses. But then sometimes I stay in a beautiful hotel. I stayed in South Africa a few months ago at a hotel, and I could smell that they had Diptyque in the lobby because I saw the Diptyque lobby shop, and it was just this beautiful fragrance. And there was no reception desk.
 
There was someone who welcomed us and said, take a seat in the garden. And we sat in the garden. He served us a glass of wine, and that was the check-in experience. And it was so different from what I was used to that it became this really great start to the rest of the stay.
 
Last week, I stayed in Paris at Maison Mère, one of our customers. And as I walked in the lobby, they said, mister Welle, welcome to the hotel. And I thought, I've never met these people. How do they know that I am mister Welle?
 
And possibly because I might be the last person to check in, but I also knew that they were anticipating that I was coming. So they probably found my photo online and made sure that all the staff was aware that I was about to arrive. And it's those things where you have someone who is so deeply passionate about that first experience because it does deeply matter about first impressions. Because when you set up for success and you build that really strong personal connection with the guest, you can only build from there.
 
If you have a bad experience, you start on the back foot. They are now going to be looking, these guests are now going to be looking for everything else that's going to go wrong and they won't be forgiving. And you want to start on a positive. So really think through what is my experience?
 
And as a hotelier, just walk through the door like you would be a guest. Like, what is the thing you see? And I went the other day with our office manager in Prague, and, you know, we've just redesigned our offices there and we spent a lot of money. And I said, let me walk you through what I experienced when I walked through the doors.
 
And I said, what's the first thing you see?
 
And, you know, there was nothing, really. It was just an empty corridor. And I said that isn't a great experience. The door was locked.
 
I had to ring a bell. Then I walk in. There wasn't a nice bowl of fruits. There wasn't a nice seating corner.
 
And it's really just visually walking through the door and recognizing what is the experience you have.
 
And as hoteliers, it is very easy to just get into the day-to-day of operating. We should every day walk in the door and think, I am a guest that sees this all for the first time.
 
What is out of place right now? What is the thing we can fix? And once you master that skill, you will anticipate, at least have a really strong base for that first experience that you can then build on. So serving in tennis is like anticipating the best first impact because once you have a great serve, you are probably gonna win the game.
 
Okay. You stuck
 
with me. So I have run completely out of tennis puns because I don't actually watch tennis, but I know that many people do. And I at least it's the one sport where I know the rules, and I was able to relate into hotels.
 
But I've definitely run out of after six, I can't find a seventh one. But I hope you enjoy that. I always enjoy challenging myself to find an angle to talk about hotels because I so deeply care about experiences. As you can see, I travel every week and I watch everything that happens in hotels because I know that these are stories that I'll share with you.
 
And, you know, when something great happens, I really call it out. This week, I talked about the breakfast I experienced at a hotel because I know that breakfast is one of the biggest pain points in a hotel. You know, waiters don't wanna work in the morning. No one wants to work an early morning shift, and they don't get tips because everything is included into the rates.
 
And it's often a buffet, so you can't create these experiences.
 
This week, I stayed at this wonderful hotel in Prague, the Alkron Hotel, and they just nailed breakfast. And it changed the way that I experienced the hotel because the hotel was a good hotel, but it was the breakfast that made it a special hotel.
 
And I think if you can break through what is anticipated to something that is better than what is expected, that's when great hoteliering happens. And we have to teach this new generation some of these great examples and talk through narratives to get people on board. So I always try and find an angle. Today was tennis.
 
The other day was Taylor Swift. To talk about how our hospitality industry is really, really special, and we have very talented people. We just have to help guide them along the way to give them great examples of how can they think outside of the box. I hope you enjoyed this. I did.
 
Thank you.