I never thought I would say this. I spent my career inside hotels and integrated resorts, and I used to swear I would never stay in an Airbnb. Then I started travelling more, and I stayed in a few — in Tokyo and in other cities — and some of the hosts have seriously raised their game.
One Tokyo host asked us, before we arrived, what we liked and disliked. What we drank. What snacks we enjoyed. When we walked in, our drinks and our snacks were waiting on the counter.
Nothing revolutionary. No AI. No expensive customer system. They simply paid attention. And an apartment suddenly felt like a home someone had prepared for us.
That is hospitality.
So what is the difference now?
It made me ask an uncomfortable question. What exactly separates a five-star hotel from a well-run private villa today?
The villa may be bigger. It may have a kitchen, a pool, more privacy. And increasingly, the host may simply know more about the guest than the hotel does.
That last part is the problem. Hotels are not short of information. We have booking systems, guest profiles, loyalty programmes, and now AI on top of all of it. We hold more about our guests than at any point in the history of the business.
And I can still walk into a five-star hotel and find generic wine, generic spirits, generic snacks in the minibar. Sometimes the minibar is practically empty, because I booked through a travel site rather than direct.
The hotel knows I am coming. They know my name. They may know I have stayed ten times before. So why am I still being treated like a stranger?
Knowing the guest is no longer a luxury
Capturing what a guest actually likes is not a nice extra any more. It is the price of entry. The questions almost answer themselves:
- If I do not drink wine, why is there wine in my room?
- If I prefer Japanese whisky, why am I given a generic one?
- If I always drink sparkling water, why do I have to ask every single time?
- If I have stayed twenty times, why does nothing in the room show it?
Here is the part most operators get backwards. Luxury is not a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine. A fifteen-dollar bottle I love is more luxurious to me than a two-hundred-dollar bottle I will not drink.
Luxury is not about what you spend. It is about whether the thing is right for this person.
Scale on one side, intimacy on the other
Hotels have scale. Independent hosts have intimacy. Whoever puts the two together wins the decade.
So this is my challenge to every hotel general manager, owner and commercial leader reading it. If your guest stayed in a private rental tomorrow, what could that host learn about them that your hotel does not already have — or has, and never uses?
Then ask the harder question. Why?
The answer is almost never the technology. It is that nobody owns the moment where what you know about a guest turns into what the guest is handed. It sits in a system, in a field nobody reads, and the room gets set the same way it is set for everyone.
What this has to do with revenue
This is not a soft topic. It is a leak, and it has a number attached to it.
A guest who feels remembered comes back, spends inside the property instead of outside it, and brings people. A guest treated like a stranger books the cheapest available room next time, because price is the only thing you have given them to judge you on. Every returning guest who is met with a generic room is revenue you already paid to acquire and then quietly handed back.
In the WHALE Code™, that read has a name. The SIGNAL Buyer Read™ profiles the person in front of you live, across six things: Speed, Influence, Guardedness, Need, Attachment, and Language. Attachment is exactly what the Tokyo host was reading — what this person is bonded to, what they treasure, what they will never economise on. It is not a survey. It is a discipline, and it can be taught to a whole floor of people.
Data tells you what the guest did. A person reads what they will do next. We wrote about that ceiling separately — see Data Tells You What the Guest Did. This piece is the other half of the problem: most properties are not even using what they already know.
The five-star hotel of the next ten years will not win on more marble, bigger rooms, or a more expensive amenity. It will win because a guest walks through the door and thinks: they remembered.
That is the new definition of five-star. Not more luxury. More relevance.
Which is where the work usually starts. Often the biggest opportunity is not finding more guests. It is doing more with the guests you already have.
Find the leak. Fix the weakness. Rebuild the revenue. We bring the revenue you ought to have.
