Hospitality has a trust crisis, and last week proved it.
Last week, my post about the Sonder x Marriott fallout unexpectedly went viral. Almost 230,000 people saw it. Hundreds commented. Many messaged privately. But, the biggest takeaway wasn’t the breakup itself. It was what the reaction revealed about the state of hospitality today.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth we’re all feeling but not saying out loud:
1. Guests don’t know who’s actually responsible anymore.
Brands, management companies, operators, OTAs, franchisees, third-party platforms…
The industry built a maze. And inside that maze, accountability dies. When things go wrong, the guest gets bounced around like a customer-service pinball. Everyone “owns” the guest relationship until something breaks , then suddenly no one does.
One Titanium Elite member told me they were transferred seven times trying to resolve a canceled reservation. Seven. And finally ended up being told: “Contact your bank.”
2. The loyalty story is cracking, and everyone knows it.
For two decades, ‘loyalty’ has been the industry’s band-aid for everything broken. Book direct. Earn points. Climb the tiers. We’ll take care of you. But loyalty isn’t a shield for bad experiences. If elite members are being told to chase down credit card refunds when a brand partnership dissolves, then what exactly are we asking them to be loyal to?
The program? Or the promise? Because right now, the promise feels broken.
3. We keep talking about “experience,” but we’ve outsourced the experience.
Real hospitality requires control: Control of the booking. Control of the communication. Control of the stay. Control of the recovery when things go wrong.
But as an industry, we’ve handed core parts of that guest journey to third parties, legacy systems, and fragmented workflows. And now we’re surprised when the experience feels transactional?
4. We’re being compared to companies that actually own the customer experience.
Guests aren’t comparing hotels to other hotels anymore. They’re comparing us to: Apple, Delta, Amazon, or even Netflix. Companies that own the customer from start to finish. Not companies where, in a moment of crisis, the answer is: “Call your bank.” The real issue isn’t the brands. It’s the architecture. Legacy tech. Legacy contracts. Legacy distribution models. Franchising structures built for the 1980s. Hotels want to deliver hospitality. Guests want to feel taken care of. But the infrastructure in between them is buckling under its own weight. And moments like these don’t create the cracks, they expose them.
Here’s what I think is coming:
This industry is overdue for a reset, not around pricing, not around loyalty points, but around responsibility and guest care. Who owns the experience? Who protects the guest in moments of failure? Who actually shows up? If we don’t rewrite this now, trust erodes. And once trust is gone, so is loyalty. The cracks aren’t the problem. The cracks are how the future gets in.
