“Every time we ask a customer to undertake a process that we are supposed to do for them, we undermine the value of our own industry and create our own doom.”
I said that recently, and I stand by it. It’s a TRAVHOTECH tenet, but more importantly, it’s a warning. We are currently witnessing a slow-motion car crash of the hospitality ethos, fueled by a corporate obsession with “self-service” that is really just a thinly veiled shift of labor from the payroll to the guest.
Remember the art of travel? The feeling that once you stepped across the threshold, the “how” was handled by experts, leaving you to enjoy the “why”? Now, we’ve replaced that expertise with a digital scavenger hunt. We ask guests to be their own travel agents, their own check-in clerks, and increasingly, their own concierge. We’ve turned the guest experience into a part-time job for the person paying the bill.
I was reading some sociology on the “prosumer” – the idea that we’re all now unpaid employees of the brands we buy from. It’s the IKEA effect, but without the cheap meatballs and the satisfaction of a finished bookshelf. In hospitality, this DIY trend is a race to the bottom. When we strip away the service, we strip away the differentiation. If every hotel is just a bed and a self-service kiosk, we’ve successfully turned ourselves into a commodity. We’ve become the Radiohead song “Fitter Happier” – a sterile, automated version of what we used to be.
We talk about technology as a “solution,” but if that solution involves the guest doing the heavy lifting, we’re just being lazy. We are effectively telling the customer that our expertise is dispensable. If they can do it all themselves, why do they need us? We are literally engineering our own obsolescence.
Life is so tech. But hospitality shouldn’t be a chore.
Mark Fancourt
