Hotel Guest Experience: Reduce Friction and Guest Effort

Before trying to delight the guest, perhaps we should first make sure we do not irritate them. It may seem an unromantic statement for an industry that has spent years talking about memorable experiences, personalisation, wow moments and creating memories. Yet the more time I spend observing hotels from the inside, the more convinced I am that part of the hospitality industry has become extraordinarily sophisticated in its discourse on the guest experience while continuing to tolerate surprisingly basic friction points. We can prepare a personalised welcome, leave an amenity in the room, remember the guest’s anniversary or design a memorable dining experience. All of that has value. A great deal of value. But it is difficult to delight someone who has spent twenty minutes waiting to check in, who already provided their details when booking and has to enter them again, who does not know where to park, who has called twice to find out the spa opening hours or who needs to ask at reception how to book a restaurant located within the hotel itself. I have learned that guests rarely analyse our organisational chart. Nor are they interested in knowing which department should have updated some information, which system was not connected to another or why a request was lost between reception, housekeeping and maintenance. From their perspective, there is only one company: the hotel. And when they have to make too much effort to obtain something that should be straightforward, all our internal sophistication ceases to matter to them. That is why I believe we have sometimes turned the guest experience into a race to add things when we should start by removing them. We add services, procedures, messages, apps, surveys, explanations, promotions and touches, but we rarely sit down to ask a far more uncomfortable question: how many things do we make guests do that they should not really have to do? I am not suggesting we abandon personalisation. In fact, the opposite is true. Well-executed personalisation is extraordinarily powerful. My point comes before all of that: first we must build an effortless experience; then we can make it memorable.

The guest experience begins where effort disappears

There is a scene I have seen far too many times in hotels. The guest arrives after several hours of travel. We know their name, their dates, the room they booked, their payment method, probably their email address, their telephone number and, if they are a returning guest, part of their history. They approach the desk and a kind of administrative interrogation begins: —May I have your name? —Your ID, please? —Address? —Email address? —Telephone number? —Could you sign here? —Breakfast is served from this time to that time. —The spa is on another floor. —To book the restaurant, you need to call this extension. —For the car park, you need to go out, turn around, come back in… And then we congratulate ourselves because, at the end of the process, we have offered them a welcome drink. Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether the best welcome drink would not have been saving them ten minutes of bureaucracy. The problem is that we have normalised many of these small inconveniences because we view them from the operational side. For us, they are procedures. For the guest, they are friction points. And that difference in perspective is enormous. When I review a hotel experience, I try to imagine the journey as though I knew absolutely nothing about the property. I do not ask only which services we offer. I ask what the guest has to do in order to use them.

Can guests find the hotel easily? An exceptional arrival begins long before the lobby. If access is complicated, the car park is poorly signposted or the entrance is not obvious, the first experience we create is not one of hospitality but of uncertainty.
Do they know what to do when they arrive? Guests should immediately understand where to go, what will happen next and roughly how long it will take. Uncertainty is often more frustrating than the wait itself.
Do we ask them for information we already have? Every repeated piece of information conveys a distinctly unsophisticated message: “the hotel does not know me”. The paradox is obvious when we then talk about personalisation.
Can they understand our services without asking? Opening hours, locations, bookings, terms, treatments, restaurants, gym, breakfast, pool, check-out, transport and any other essential service should be exceptionally easy to consult.
Can they request something without having to learn our internal organisation? Guests should not need to know whether their request belongs to reception, housekeeping, maintenance, concierge or food and beverage. They should simply ask for it.
Do they know what is included and what has a charge? Ambiguity creates uncertainty. A good experience requires transparency, especially when it comes to prices, supplements, cancellations or additional services.
Can they change their mind easily? Amending a booking, changing a time, cancelling a service or correcting a preference should not become a bureaucratic negotiation.
Do we resolve issues at the first point of contact? Few things damage an experience as much as hearing: “You need to discuss that with another department”.
Are we making guests wait because it is genuinely unavoidable or because our process is poorly designed? They are radically different things.
Do guests have to chase us to find out what is happening? In the event of any issue, proactive communication greatly reduces anxiety.

This way of analysing the experience is closely related to the Customer Effort Score (CES): it does not simply ask whether the guest was satisfied, but how much effort they had to make to get what they needed. And that seemingly simple question can be rather uncomfortable. Because we can have a good overall score while concealing small operational absurdities. A guest may rate the room, facilities and team positively and still have needed to call three times to get a pillow. They may thoroughly enjoy breakfast and yet have spent fifteen minutes trying to find out what time it ended. They may recommend the hotel and still clearly remember having waited half an hour to receive their key. Averages conceal friction. And repeated friction eventually becomes poor processes that we have learned to consider normal. There is also another common mistake: confusing the absence of problems with an excellent experience. They are not exactly the same thing. A hotel’s first obligation is to make things work. But then we can build on that foundation to create emotion, recognition and lasting memories. I would represent it as a very simple sequence: Make it work → Make it easy → Personalise → Delight Not the other way around. If making it work fails, dissatisfaction appears. If making it easy fails, effort appears. If personalisation fails, we will probably have a correct but generic experience. And when the previous three work, then we can aspire to delight. Sometimes we try to jump straight to the final step. And that explains some of the great contrasts we still find in hospitality: hotels capable of preparing extraordinary anniversary amenities while a guest waits for their room without anyone explaining what is happening. It is not a lack of hospitality. It is a matter of priorities.

Fewer designed “wow” moments and more “of course” moments

For years, we have heard about wow moments. I think the intention is good: to exceed expectations, create memories and forge an emotional connection with the guest. The problem arises when we turn “wow” into a kind of independent objective. Because there is another type of experience that is far less spectacular but that I consider equally important. It is the “of course” moment. —Could you store our luggage until this afternoon? Of course. —We will arrive quite late; will that be a problem? Not at all. —Could I change the time of my massage? Let us check. —Our room is not ready yet. Can we use the facilities while we wait? Of course. —Can you send me the invoice with these details? Of course. These moments do not produce photographs for Instagram. They probably will not appear in a corporate presentation on innovation either. But they build something extraordinarily important: trust. The guest begins to feel that the hotel is on their side. And few things represent hospitality better. Eliminating friction does not mean eliminating people. There are processes we need to simplify and others we need to humanise. The real criterion should be to ask where a person adds value. An exceptional employee applying judgement, empathy, conversation, anticipation or the ability to resolve a complex situation adds enormous value. That same employee copying data from a document the hotel already has adds far less. A person explaining the destination, recommending a restaurant or reassuring someone when there is an issue represents hospitality. A person forced to recite every opening hour at the property for three minutes because we have not found a better way to communicate that information is compensating for a poor process. That is why hotel excellence does not mean choosing between efficiency and humanity. It means eliminating what consumes time without generating value, so that more time can be devoted to what does generate value. There is another issue I consider fundamental: the guest’s time also has economic value. In hospitality, we are accustomed to measuring our own time: staff hours, productivity, labour cost, overtime, cleaning time, average check-in time or preparation time. But we rarely account with the same seriousness for the time we make the guest lose. Five minutes waiting here. Three minutes repeating information there. Ten minutes looking for somewhere to park. Another call because nobody answered the first one. A trip to reception because they could not find a way to request something from the room. Individually, they seem like minor inconveniences. Collectively, they form the experience. And here is an idea I consider crucial for any hotel Customer Experience strategy: Guests do not experience our departments. They experience a sequence of efforts. Every time they need to search, wait, ask, repeat, confirm, insist, correct or chase an answer, we are removing small amounts of value from the experience. I like to think of it as a kind of emotional current account. A room ready ahead of time adds value. A sincere welcome adds value. Someone remembering a preference adds value. Resolving a request quickly adds value. But a queue takes value away. Incorrect information takes value away. Having to call twice takes value away. Two departments giving different answers takes value away. Waiting without knowing how long takes away quite a lot. We can try to make up for it later with a bottle of wine. But it would be far less costly —and probably smarter— not to have created the debt in the first place. This also requires us to revisit a word we use constantly: personalisation. Personalising does not necessarily mean knowing which wine the guest drinks or putting their name on a screen. Sometimes personalising simply means not making them explain something they already told us yesterday. It means remembering that they requested a quiet room. Knowing that they are arriving late. Not offering them something they have already purchased. Not sending them irrelevant information. Understanding that they are travelling for work and probably value speed. Recognising that they have come to rest and may appreciate exactly the opposite: not being disturbed. Truly good personalisation is usually quite discreet. It does not shout: “Look how much we know about you.” It makes people think: “How easy everything has been.” And that is probably one of the greatest compliments a hotel can receive today. That is why, when I want to genuinely assess an experience, in addition to studying reputation, satisfaction or likelihood to recommend, I would introduce a much more down-to-earth audit. I would personally go through the complete hotel customer journey and note every occasion when guests must make an unnecessary effort. Book. Confirm. Arrive. Park. Enter. Identify themselves. Wait. Access the room. Connect. Find information. Book services. Ask for help. Change something. Pay. Request the invoice. Leave. And at every stage, I would ask four questions:

Is this step necessary?
Can we remove it?
If we cannot remove it, can we make it easier?
If we cannot simplify it either, can we at least make it pleasant?

That order matters. Because for too long we have tried to make pleasant what we perhaps should have removed. Putting more comfortable chairs in a queue still leaves a queue. Offering a drink while we fill in a form still leaves a form. Politely apologising for confusing information still leaves confusing information. Training the team to manage a complaint is necessary. Eliminating the recurring cause of that complaint is far better. Excellent hospitality should work precisely there: upstream of the problem. When we find five similar complaints, we do not have five difficult guests. We probably have a flawed process. When reception answers the same question thirty times a day, perhaps we do not need to train reception to answer it better. Perhaps we need to ask why the guest has to ask it. When calls asking whether the room is ready are constantly repeated, we do not have a problem with calls. We have an information problem. When someone has to physically go to reception to get something simple, perhaps we do not have an interaction opportunity. Perhaps we have friction. This shift in perspective profoundly transforms hotel management because it requires us to stop thinking only in terms of departments and start thinking in terms of journeys. And journeys cross departments. An arrival may involve reservations, reception, housekeeping and maintenance. A dinner may involve reception, food and beverage, the kitchen and billing. An incident may cut across half the hotel. The guest, however, sees only one experience. That is why a genuine service culture requires more than friendly employees. It needs processes that enable those employees to be effective. I have met exceptional professionals working within absurd procedures. And something curious happens: for a while, they manage to compensate for them. They call. They run. They ask. They chase answers. They ask for favours. They improvise. The guest may even end up satisfied thanks to them. But we should not confuse the heroic capability of our teams with a well-designed operation. If we need heroes every day to deliver excellent service, the process is probably flawed. A good hotel should make it relatively easy to do things well for those who work within it too. Because there is an obvious relationship: less friction for the employee → less friction for the guest. If a receptionist needs to open five different places to answer a question, the guest will wait. If housekeeping does not clearly know arrival priorities, someone will wait. If food and beverage does not receive a request correctly, someone will have to repeat it. If nobody knows who can make a decision, someone will say: “I need to check.” The customer experience often begins in processes the customer never sees. That is why I believe one of the best meetings a hotel team can hold does not need to begin by asking: “What can we add to the experience this year?” I would begin with another question: “What can we stop making the guest do?” The conversation changes completely. Waiting times emerge. Duplications. Unnecessary questions. Incomprehensible emails. Opening hours that are difficult to find. Inherited procedures. Signatures whose purpose nobody remembers. Unnecessary journeys. Contradictory information. Internal rules that we have ended up confusing with guest needs. And that is where some of the best opportunities for innovation in hospitality emerge. Not necessarily by creating something new. Sometimes simply by removing something old. My first recommendation would therefore be to observe the stay in terms of effort and not only satisfaction. For one week, note every question received by reception, reservations, the restaurant, the spa and any other touchpoint. Group them. If the same question appears continually, do not celebrate the fact that your team knows how to answer it perfectly: ask yourself why the customer still needs to ask it. That is often where an extraordinary opportunity for improvement lies. The second would be to protect the guest’s time as you protect your own. Every unnecessary wait, every detail requested twice and every interaction created solely to satisfy our internal organisation should strike us as a small design failure. We will not be able to eliminate every wait or every procedure, but we can make them less frequent, shorter and, above all, more predictable. An informed guest will generally tolerate a wait far better than one left in uncertainty. And the third would be never to give up the detail, the conversation or the emotion. They are an essential part of this profession. But I would put each thing in its proper order. First, make it work. Then make it easy. Next, make it personal. And when all that is resolved, try to make it unforgettable. Perhaps we will then discover that many guests do not need fireworks to consider a stay exceptional. Sometimes it is enough to achieve something far more difficult: making everything feel surprisingly easy for a few days.

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