Hotels Don’t Compete Only with Hotels: They Compete with Guest Expectations
For many years, we have understood hotel competition in a rather comfortable way. We looked at hotels in our category, studied their rates, compared facilities, analysed their online reputation and tried to determine who was gaining market share. It made sense. If you ran a four-star beachfront hotel, your competitors appeared to be the other four-star beachfront hotels. If you managed an urban property, you looked at the urban hotels in your city. And if you worked in luxury, you watched what luxury was doing.
I still consider it essential to understand the competitive set. We need to know how demand is evolving, what prices the market is willing to accept, which products are emerging, how our competitors’ positioning is changing and where guest preferences are shifting. But I am increasingly convinced that this picture explains only part of reality. Because while we continue comparing hotels with hotels, the guest is comparing experiences with experiences.
The guest arriving at Reception today has not spent the past few weeks living exclusively in hotels. They have shopped online, booked restaurants, used mobile banking, received parcels at home, ordered food, managed subscriptions, used transport apps, spoken with customer service teams and probably completed dozens of transactions that only ten years ago required phone calls, forms, waiting or travel. All of these experiences have quietly shaped a very specific idea of how good service should work.
That is why one of the most important transformations I see in Hospitality is not necessarily happening within hotels. It is happening outside them. The speed, simplicity, personalisation, transparency and responsiveness consumers encounter in other sectors ultimately become expectations when they walk through our doors. It matters little that certain practices may not be common in Hospitality. For the guest, the comparison is not always between industries; it is between what they have just experienced and what we are offering them.
And here is an idea that I believe deserves far more attention in our hotel strategic planning: our true benchmark is no longer just the hotel across the street. It is the best experience our guest has had recently, anywhere. That comparison is deeply uncomfortable because it expands the playing field enormously. But it can also become an extraordinary source of innovation.
The hotel’s new competitive set lies outside Hospitality
Years ago, we could assume that certain frictions were a natural part of the journey. You had to wait. You had to fill in forms. You had to call. You had to repeat information. You had to adapt to certain timetables. Guests accepted many of these small inconveniences because they were commonplace.
Stop managing isolated systems. Start managing the whole hotel.
HotelGEX connects guests, operations, Revenue, F&B, Groups & Events and Management into one intelligent hotel context — so every decision starts with a clearer picture.
Today, that tolerance has changed.
Salesforce notes that 80% of customers consider the experience provided by a company to be as important as its products or services, and that 79% expect consistent interactions across departments. There is an even more interesting figure for this reflection: earlier research by the same organisation found that 73% of customers said that an extraordinary experience with one company raised their expectations of other companies.
That final figure sums up the issue rather well.
A good experience in another sector indirectly changes what the guest expects from our hotel.
Consumers do not need to understand our organisational structure, our procedures or the challenges behind a hotel operation. And, in truth, they should not have to.
When someone can amend certain purchases in seconds, they begin to wonder why changing an aspect of a hotel booking requires several emails.
When they receive virtually immediate information about the status of an order, they begin to view uncertainty differently.
When certain companies remember their preferences, it starts to feel strange to have to explain exactly the same thing every time they return to a property.
When a restaurant booking can be made with great ease, an unnecessarily complicated hotel experience starts to feel even more complicated.
And when they can resolve certain issues without explaining what happened five times, our classic pilgrimage of “Reception → Reservations → Administration → call back tomorrow” stops seeming like an internal procedure and simply starts to feel like a poor guest experience.
We see departments.
The guest sees a hotel.
This difference may seem elementary, but it continues to explain many issues in the hotel guest experience.
PwC offers another interesting signal. In its 2025 customer experience study, 70% of executives acknowledge that consumer expectations are evolving faster than their organisations’ ability to adapt. In addition, 29% of consumers surveyed said they had stopped buying from or using a brand specifically because of a poor customer experience.
The issue, therefore, is not merely about improving service. It is about understanding that the definition of good service is constantly shifting.
And we are not the ones defining it.
It is being defined by the sum of experiences consumers live through.
For years, I have seen hotels benchmark by visiting competing properties. It remains useful. There is always something to learn from observing how other professionals work. But perhaps we should broaden the exercise.
I would also ask:
- Which companies make it exceptionally easy to buy from them? Not to copy their tools, but to examine how they have removed unnecessary steps. Simplicity has become a product feature.
- Which businesses manage waiting especially well? Because often the issue is not waiting ten minutes, but not knowing whether it will be ten, twenty or forty. Information radically changes the perception of time.
- Who remembers their customers well? I am not referring to theatrical personalisation based on repeating a guest’s surname five times during check-in. I mean remembering what prevents effort or genuinely improves the stay.
- Which organisations resolve issues without transferring their internal complexity to the consumer? Excellent service is not only about making few mistakes. It is also about having sufficient service recovery capability when mistakes inevitably occur.
- Who enables customers to remain in control? Being able to choose, amend, understand and decide creates reassurance. And reassurance has enormous value in Hospitality.
- Which experiences successfully combine efficiency and humanity? This point seems especially important to me. The future of Hospitality should not be about eliminating people, but about removing the tasks and frictions that prevent people from focusing on precisely where they add the most value.
This final question deserves a moment’s consideration.
Research involving more than 5,000 consumers and over 600 hospitality professionals for the Hospitality in 2025 report found precisely that guests were bringing into accommodation the conveniences they already enjoyed in restaurants, retail and e-commerce. The important reading is not technological. It is cultural: consumers do not reset their expectations when they enter a hotel.
They arrive wearing them.
Just as they arrive with their luggage.
The real competitive advantage will be reducing the gap between expectation and experience
There is a very simple equation I use mentally when I think about guest satisfaction:
Perceived experience – prior expectation = satisfaction.
It is not intended as an exact mathematical formula, naturally, but it is tremendously useful for understanding many situations.
We can provide exactly the same service to two guests and receive entirely different ratings because they did not arrive with the same expectations.
This is one of the major challenges of interpreting satisfaction surveys solely through an operational lens.
A low score does not necessarily mean that we have done something objectively wrong. It may mean there is a gap between what we offer and what the guest expected to receive.
And that expectation comes from multiple places.
From the price.
From the photographs.
From our website.
From the category.
From reviews.
From previous experiences.
From other hotels.
From recommendations.
From brand positioning.
But also, increasingly, from experiences entirely outside Hospitality.
This even changes how we should understand hotel repositioning.
Repositioning is not just about refurbishing rooms, changing photographs, increasing rates or designing a new visual identity. It means raising a promise. And every time we raise a promise, we also raise the standard against which the guest will assess the experience.
I have learned to be rather wary of improvements that work only in the commercial presentation.
A spectacular photograph can increase conversion.
An aspirational description can improve positioning.
A higher rate can reinforce the perception of category.
But all three simultaneously increase the pre-arrival expectation.
And if operations do not progress at the same pace, marketing can end up creating a rather unpleasant paradox: selling an experience better that subsequently becomes harder to deliver.
That is why marketing and operations should not work as independent universes.
Marketing creates expectations.
Operations must deliver on them.
Public reputation then determines whether the market believes there was consistency between the two.
Today, that cycle is one of the central elements of any hotel strategy.
There is also a second phenomenon that I consider especially relevant: the normalisation of excellence.
What surprised us yesterday is simply expected tomorrow.
A rapid response can become standard.
A flexible policy can become standard.
Remembering certain preferences can become standard.
Clear pre-arrival information can become standard.
Resolving a request without passing it between departments can become standard.
And when something becomes standard, it progressively ceases to create differentiation, while its absence begins to generate dissatisfaction.
It is the cruel economics of expectations.
Guests rarely write a review saying:
"Fantastic. The shower had hot water."
But try not having it.
A great many service features follow exactly that path: they begin as innovation, evolve into differentiation and end up becoming a minimum requirement.
That is why I believe hotels should introduce a different exercise into their strategic meetings. Alongside traditional competitive benchmarking, we should regularly analyse which new expectations our guests are acquiring outside the sector.
We could structure it around five questions:
- What has become easier in the guest’s everyday life over the past twelve months?
- Which frictions do they still tolerate in our hotel that they no longer accept in other sectors?
- What information do they expect to receive automatically, without having to request it?
- At what moments do they need autonomy, and when do they expect human attention?
- Which element we now consider differentiating will probably be simply standard within three years?
Answering these questions honestly may be far more useful than visiting twenty competitor hotel websites.
Because there is another risk in traditional benchmarking: copying one another until we end up looking too alike.
The hotel across the street adds an experience, and we add a similar one.
They change breakfast, and we change breakfast.
They offer a particular service, and we begin to explore how to offer it.
They use a particular commercial phrase and, mysteriously, six months later half the city seems to have hired the same copywriter.
In this way, we may improve our relative position against competitors and yet continue falling behind the consumer.
Innovation in Hospitality does not always require inventing something that has never existed. Often, it means intelligently observing something that already works exceptionally well in another context and asking ourselves:
What principle lies behind this experience, and how could I bring it into a hotel?
Do not copy the format.
Copy the learning.
Because a logistics company can teach us about managing expectations.
A restaurant can teach us about recognition.
A retailer can teach us about product presentation.
An airline can teach us about communication during service disruptions.
A luxury brand can teach us about rituals.
A small business can teach us about closeness.
And an outstanding professional personally serving twenty guests can remind us of something no major strategy should allow us to forget: people remain extraordinarily good at making other people feel important.
That ability remains one of Hospitality’s greatest advantages.
That is why I do not believe we should obsessively pursue every new expectation that emerges. It would be impossible and would probably leave us building hotels with no personality, trying to satisfy everyone at once.
Strategy also means deciding which expectations we want to meet exceptionally well and which do not form part of our proposition.
A peaceful hotel does not need to become an entertainment hotel because some guests want activities.
A property focused on rest does not need to embrace every leisure trend.
Nor does an independent hotel need to imitate every service offered by a major chain.
Positioning means choosing.
But it is one thing to consciously decide that a particular expectation is not part of our product, and quite another to retain a friction simply because “we have always done it this way”.
That, for me, is the important boundary.
My first recommendation would be that, in your next strategic review, you do not ask only what your competitors are doing better. Ask what excellent experiences your guests are having when they are not travelling. Observe how they buy, how they book, how they receive information, how they resolve issues and how they expect to be recognised. There, you will probably find some of the next Hospitality trends before they appear in any industry report.
The second would be to review the hotel customer journey from the perspective of effort. Every unnecessary call, every repeated piece of information, every unexplained wait, every department to which we pass a problem and every procedure designed for our convenience rather than the guest’s deserves one very simple question: would we still design it this way if we were starting from scratch today? Some answers may be uncomfortable. That is precisely why the question is worth asking.
And the third would be not to forget what other sectors can hardly copy from us. We can learn a great deal from them about speed, personalisation, simplicity and convenience, but we work with something extraordinarily powerful: human hospitality. A person who observes, understands, anticipates, remembers, reassures and resolves can completely transform a stay. Perhaps the best strategy is not to turn the hotel into what works outside it, but to learn from everything that works outside it so that, when the guest walks in, our hotel works even better as a hotel.
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