Resuscitating Hospitality: From Stabilization to Recovery
In acute rehabilitation, we separate stabilization from recovery. Stabilization keeps the patient alive. Recovery gets function back. They call for different interventions, different timelines, and different ways of measuring progress.
Back in February, Navigating a Broken Hospitality System covered stabilization: the things a traveler can do to get through a stay at a property that is not holding up its end. This piece is about recovery, meaning what the industry would have to change and what we can reasonably ask for as the people paying for the room.
I have logged enough hotel nights for healthcare consulting work to have opinions, and I look at hotels the same way I look at the facilities I work in. When the same problems show up across different properties and different brands, that usually points to a decision made above the property level, not a bad week at one front desk. Healthcare has its own version of this, where the margin starts driving decisions that used to be driven by the mission. The difference is that an emergency department is legally required to stabilize a patient whether or not it is profitable. Hotels have no equivalent obligation, so recovery is not going to happen on its own.
The Business Model Changed, the Promise Did Not
The pandemic gave hotels a reason to cut daily housekeeping, shrink breakfast, close lounges, and shorten front desk hours. Those cuts were presented as temporary and safety-related. Years later, a lot of them are still in place, and the rates have not come down to match.
The marketing did not change either. Brand sites still describe a full-service experience and guest-focused hospitality, and the resort fees and parking charges are still there. When the description and the stay do not match, guests notice, even if they never say anything at checkout.
In healthcare operations we call this mission drift: an organization’s day-to-day decisions no longer line up with what it says it is for. A hospital drifts when billing starts to shape care. A hotel drifts when the job quietly becomes managing room inventory with as few labor hours as possible. I do not think that is a temporary response to a bad stretch anymore. It looks like the model now, and I would rather call it that than keep waiting for the old version to come back.
Both Sides Have a Part
The February piece was about what travelers can control: our expectations, our routines, how we respond in the moment. That helps, but it only gets you through the stay. Nothing about the property changes because you packed your own washcloth.
I am not arguing for a return to some golden era, and I am not arguing that guests are owed everything they want. My point is narrower. Hotels cannot keep reducing service while raising prices and still expect loyalty to hold, and travelers who keep absorbing worse conditions without saying anything make it easier to keep going in that direction.
What I Would Want to See From Hotels
Restore the baseline, or describe the product honestly. Daily housekeeping, a working breakfast, and enough staff to cover the shift are reasonable expectations at a full-service price. If a property is not going to provide them, it should say so plainly and price the stay accordingly. Most travelers can live with less. What wears on people is finding out at check-in.
Staff the building. On a lot of my recent stays, one person at the desk is checking guests in, answering the phone, and handling the breakfast area. Those employees are usually doing the best they can with what they have been given. Service follows staffing and training, and both cost money that I do not see being spent.
Hold franchises to the brand standard. Two properties under the same flag in different cities can feel like different companies. If brand standards mean anything, a property that misses them over and over should face some consequence beyond a quality score nobody sees.
Show what is actually there. If the pool, lounge, or restaurant is closed, the photos and the amenity list should reflect that.
Track the guest experience alongside the revenue. Occupancy and rate tell an owner how the property is doing financially. They do not say much about whether anyone would come back.
Where Travelers Have Some Leverage
Reassess your loyalty on a regular basis. This is easier to write than to do. For the occasional traveler, status is hard to earn in the first place, and walking away from a program you have finally made progress in feels like a loss. For the full-time business traveler, the pull runs the other way: you have built years of status, the next tier is always within reach, and there is a real fear of missing out on the upgrade or the benefit you have been working toward. Both are reasons people stay with a brand long after it has stopped earning it. I do not think the answer is to quit on principle. It is to look at the program on a schedule, at least once a year and more often if you travel heavily, and ask whether the benefits you are actually receiving still justify the stays you are committing. I worked through my own version of that math in When to Break Loyalty. If the answer is no, moving your stays is the clearest feedback a brand gets.
Ask before you book. Is housekeeping daily or by request? Are the posted lounge hours current? Is breakfast a full menu or grab-and-go? Getting the property to state its service level up front sets the expectation for both sides, and gives you something to point to later if the stay does not match.
Name the places that get it right. When a hotel still runs the way a hotel should, say so in a review, go back, and tell people who travel the same routes. Properties that hold their standards are competing on the same booking sites as the ones that have cut, and the specific, recent reviews are one of the few places that difference shows up.
Pay attention to who is trying to do better. Some brands and independent properties are deliberately bringing services back or advertising them honestly. Those are worth supporting with your bookings when the price and location work.
Push back on “temporary” when it is not. An amenity that has been temporarily unavailable for several years is not temporary. Mention it at the desk, put it in your review, and if it is tied to a fee or a brand promise, raise it with the brand’s customer care team. Properties hear about these things far less often than you would expect.
Who Is Asking for More for Less?
The industry sometimes describes this as guests having unrealistic expectations. It is worth looking at what has actually changed:
Room rates are well above where they were before the pandemic in most markets.
Service levels have dropped, including housekeeping frequency, breakfast, and staffing.
Resort fees and parking charges keep climbing.
Loyalty program benefits have been devalued and will likely continue to decline.
From where I sit, travelers are paying more and getting less, and the staff I see at the desk and on the floor are covering more ground than they used to. I do not know exactly where the difference is going, but it is not showing up in the stay.
What Recovery Would Take
I do not expect any single guest or review to change how a brand operates. What moves a brand is a pattern it can see in its own numbers: members drifting to competitors, properties picking up the same complaints, review scores sliding at the flags that cut the most. That pattern is just a lot of individual travelers making informed choices and writing down what happened.
For my part, I will keep doing what this blog has been doing from the start: writing about what I actually see on the road, naming the properties that get it right, and being specific about the ones that do not. If that helps someone choose a better hotel or decide a status tier is not worth chasing anymore, that is enough.
Adapting to the way travel works right now is practical. It just should not turn into accepting that this is as good as it gets.
Comments