The Guest We Don’t Want: When the Best Decision Is to Refer Them to Another Hotel

For many years in Hospitality, we have repeated a phrase that, through sheer repetition, we have come to treat almost as a sacred principle: the customer is always right. I agree with it less and less. Guests are entitled to receive exactly what we have promised, to be heard when something goes wrong, to complain when we fail to deliver, and to receive a professional response. But that is very different from assuming that any behaviour, demand or expectation must be accepted simply because someone has paid for a room.

Over the years, I have also learned something that I consider even more important: not every customer is our customer. It may seem obvious from a marketing perspective, because we spend a great deal of time discussing segmentation, positioning and target audiences, yet curiously we forget that same logic when the guest walks through the hotel door. If we have designed a particular product, defined a value proposition and deliberately chosen a way of understanding hospitality, there will inevitably be travellers for whom our hotel is not the right choice. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.