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BYAlbert BarraHospitality · Strategy · Leadership · Marketing
Not every guest is the right fit for every hotel. Some arrive with expectations that conflict with the property’s value proposition, while others create a disproportionate operational and emotional burden through constant complaints, unreasonable demands or disrespectful behaviour. A mature hotel strategy must distinguish between a legitimate complaint, a demanding guest who helps the business improve, and a guest who simply does not fit the property. True hospitality excellence is not about trying to satisfy everyone indiscriminately. It means delivering an exceptional experience to the right guest, protecting hotel teams and preserving product consistency. Sometimes, that requires the confidence and grace to recognise that another hotel may be better able to make that guest happy.
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.
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