Hospitality training methods will have to change because there is a growing trend amongst small hotel groups and independent hotels to move away from the pervasive, traditional, mechanical, and emotionless SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience. Over the coming years the focus of hotels will be more and more on the energy of the guest experience and on the essence of hospitality, which lies in loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. This requires very different training methods and skills.
To create an energetic heart-based hospitality guest experience, which is strong in these core values, you cannot use traditional, left brain training methods because the future guest experience will focus on the energetic feeling and spirit of the experience. Hospitality trainers are going to have to learn how to create an extremely soft, warm, gentle, and loving guest experience.
Firstly, the trainer has to study energy. The trainer must understand how energy works, how it travels, how human energy interacts with and affects the physical environment and a person’s body, how to change the vibration of energy, and how to use energy to increase the happiness of the guests and yourself. The trainer should study basic quantum science, thought energy, and heart energy; otherwise, there is no way that the trainer will be able to help a hotel to create an energetic hospitality guest experience, which is the future of hospitality.
As hotel staff become good at using, changing, sending, and conditioning energy, they will feel happier and they will become truer to their real loving self. At the same time, their desire to show loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care will grow. You will not have to tell them to be warm, loving, and kind. Companies spend fortunes trying to make their employees want to behave in certain ways, but the solution is closer than your life-vein.
In contrast, traditional training methods focus on telling the participants what they should do. But telling hotel staff what loving kindness or compassion mean and that they must serve with kindness will not make the staff do so authentically or make them want to do so. To create an energetic hospitality guest experience, the desire to show loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care must come from within, and to make this happen, the trainer must work through the hearts of the staff.
The trainer, therefore, must know how to open the hearts of the staff. You do this by stimulating the participant’s emotions of love and compassion through moving videos, stories, and certain kinds of spiritual quotations and music. You know how much your heart is open by the extent to which you have a desire to be loving, kind, compassionate, and caring; by how easy it is to express and show love; and by how much you have a feeling of softness, expansion, lightness, and a gentle happiness in your chest. Most people need help in this area, so this is an important area for the trainer to experiment in.
The more your heart is open, the more you choose to express love in each moment. You are true to your real, loving self. You communicate with love. You think in kind ways, speak kind words, and you have a heart-driven intention behind all your interactions with others. You are not afraid to let the energy of the heart flow. Being able to open the heart of the hotel staff is a fundamental skill in creating the energetic heart-based hospitality guest experience of the future.
The trainer must also know how to change energy because every member of staff will have to work on their own energy. Their energy affects the feelings of the guests. As you change your energetic vibration, the desire to show love increases. There are many ways to change your energy, but the starting point is to learn about the body’s energy system. You must learn how energy enters and leaves the body, how it travels around it, what affects the frequency of energy you give out, and how to clean and change your energy. Feeling gratitude, thinking loving thoughts, meditating, making use of the energy in Nature, and various energy techniques are excellent ways to change your body’s energy.
The trainer must help the staff to understand how guests feel behind their mask, with all their worries, problems, and stress. Irrespective of their outer appearance most people are like “walking wounded”. They need lots of loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care, even if they deny it. You can create this understanding by means of stories, videos, music, meditations, and spiritual quotations.
The trainer needs to make it clear what loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care each means, looks like, and feels like. In addition to using the methods mentioned above, a continuous daily deepening programme, which focuses on these core values, is also needed.
Role plays should be carried out with a focus on the warmth of the interaction. After each role play, ask the participants, “Was it warm enough?” The answer is always “No” because love has no ceiling. Have the participants repeat the role play with increased warmth. Repeat this process several times. You will find that when combined with the ideas above, their service becomes so much warmer, softer, and gentler.
This article provides a brief look at how hotels and hospitality training companies will have to change their training methods, approach, and focus. When trainers learn how to focus on loving kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care; work through the heart; and work with energy to create the guest experience, they will discover that they can exert a wonderful effect on the staff, the guest experience, and the hotel’s financial performance. The resulting guest experience will be so much warmer and caring than what current traditional training methods produce.
