Hospitality Products and Services

Sometimes we wonder whether we are properly focusing our marketing and distribution strategies and whether we are adequately managing the service we offer. We have an industrial mindset, based on the idea that what we offer is a product that we must create and then launch onto the market, following purely push strategies. All that remains is to package it—or perhaps we already do? In reality, we make the mistake of thinking that we create the “product”, without understanding that we are losing control over it. Let us call it what it is: the product is actually a service, and it is not us who create it, but rather our interaction with the guest. We create certain situations and scenarios, and encourage certain things to happen, but ultimately it is the guest who decides. And they do not only decide on the service, but also on the brand: they are constantly creating it online through their opinions of us. We need to change our strategy, moving from a push strategy to a pull strategy, from launching the service onto the market to listening to the market and creating the product it demands. The industrial mindset must give way to a service mindset, one in which we understand that, in a service business, employees are not tools but co-creators of the “product” alongside the guest. They are our most important salespeople in front of the guest, the ones who control our entire image at the moments of truth. If we continue to manage cost centres in an industrial manner, thinking that our hotels produce more or less controlled and controllable products, with defined boundaries and entirely our own, we will make the mistake of believing that the guest is merely that—a guest—without understanding that they are also an advocate, a consultant, a manager of our brand and a creator of our reputation.