Hospitality Excellence Is Not About Doing Everything Perfectly: It’s About Getting Better
In hospitality, we talk constantly about excellence, yet too often confuse it with perfection, sophistication or exceptional results. True hospitality excellence is built differently: through consistency, discipline, learning, purpose, patience, humility and hundreds of small decisions executed well over time. Drawing on Brad Stulberg’s reflections on excellence, I explore how these principles apply to everyday hotel operations and why the real goal should not be an imagined state of perfection, but organisations that can improve continuously while keeping people, performance and purpose in view.
There is one word we use far too readily in Hospitality: excellence. It appears in corporate presentations, quality manuals, welcome speeches, strategic plans and team meetings. We promise excellent service, pursue excellent experiences and aspire to excellent results. The problem begins when we try to explain exactly what it means. After many years working in hotels, I am increasingly convinced that excellence has far less to do with reaching a particular standard and far more to do with how we choose to work when no one can guarantee the outcome.
Brad Stulberg’s reflection in The Way of Excellence strikes me as particularly interesting because it separates excellence from two concepts with which we often confuse it: perfection and obsession. Excellence is not about never making mistakes. Nor does it mean constantly demanding more until work becomes a competition against ourselves and others. It is an ongoing process of growth around something we consider important. Applied to our industry, I would say that an excellent hotel is not necessarily one where nothing ever goes wrong—that hotel probably does not exist—but one that has developed the ability to learn, correct, persevere and improve systematically.
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