For years, I took part in meetings where almost everything important to the operation of a hotel eventually found its way onto the table. We reviewed occupancy, rates, costs, maintenance, staffing, sales, guest comments and operational problems. Some conversations could be resolved in a few minutes; others ended up crossing several departments before an answer could be found. Every subject had an obvious reason for being there and, generally, someone responsible for dealing with it.
After everything we had explored up to that point, I began to imagine one of those meetings from a slightly different perspective. Nothing extraordinary needed to have happened. The renovation of several rooms might have been completed, food and beverage might have changed something about breakfast, reception might have found a different way of coordinating certain arrivals, and reservations might have begun receiving enquiries that had rarely appeared before. Perhaps several recent reviews mentioned the same characteristic or pointed to a difficulty that was beginning to recur. These were normal situations in the life of any property, and each seemed to belong to a different problem.
The renovated room might be a matter for maintenance or operations; breakfast, for food and beverage; arrivals, for reception; enquiries, for reservations; and reviews, perhaps, for whoever monitored the hotel’s reputation. Yet there was something none of those classifications quite managed to show: each change could also alter what someone needed to understand about the property before choosing it.
The previous conversation had left us precisely there. We had concluded that part of the knowledge accumulated by the operation needed to leave traces outside when it could change a choice. But leaving a trace once did not solve the problem forever. The hotel continued to move after the trace had been left.
A photograph could continue to show a room that was no longer exactly like that. A policy could remain published even though the way it was applied had changed. A service could disappear from the operation and continue to be mentioned somewhere. The opposite could happen as well: the team might learn to address consistently a need it had previously been unable to meet, and no one outside the property might ever find out. While the real hotel continued accumulating decisions, learning and changes, the version that could be understood from the outside risked standing still.
No one needed to have communicated anything false for that to happen. A description might have been entirely true on the day it was written and cease to represent the property accurately months or years later. A photograph might have faithfully shown a room before a renovation. A policy might have correctly explained a condition that later changed. Becoming outdated did not necessarily turn what had once been true into a lie, but it could eventually produce a mistaken understanding of the present.
I remembered then something we had discovered much earlier, when we were trying to decide how much to trust the signals we found. How current they were also formed part of their value. At the time, we had looked at it from the position of someone outside the hotel who needed to know whether what they found still described the property. Now the same question appeared from the other side: if we knew the operation had changed, who was responsible for ensuring that those changes capable of affecting a choice also found some expression outside?
The most immediate answer seemed to lead towards communications or marketing. For a long time, I probably would have thought the same way. If a photograph needed changing, a description correcting, a published policy modifying or a page updating, it seemed reasonable for responsibility to end there. But the more I looked at the problem, the clearer it became that none of those areas could update what they did not know.
The person who discovered that a particular room was better suited to a certain need might work at reception. The housekeeping team might notice a difference that no commercial description mentioned. Reservations might recognise that a question was beginning to recur. Food and beverage might have learned how far it could adapt to a restriction and under what conditions it needed to know about it in advance. Management might change a policy while guests began remembering something different from what the hotel continued to place in the foreground.
The information that made it possible to keep the property understandable was therefore emerging in many of the same places where the knowledge we had followed through the previous conversations had emerged. The difference was that we were no longer asking only how to help it cross shifts and departments in order to guide better decisions. Some of those decisions also needed to find a way out, and no communications department could do that with something the organisation had not learned to recognise and share.
The scene of that meeting began to change. A newly renovated room no longer led only to the question of when it could be sold again, but also whether the photographs and descriptions still corresponded with what the guest would find. A change in the way arrivals were coordinated did not necessarily end once reception understood the new procedure: if the conditions of the service had changed, something a future guest needed to know might have changed as well.
The same happened when a new capability emerged. If food and beverage had learned, after repeatedly resolving certain situations, which restrictions it could accommodate and under what conditions, that knowledge might remain purely operational until reservations began receiving the same enquiry again and again. At that point, another question appeared: did that possibility need to be discoverable before someone chose?
Reviews could introduce a different kind of conversation. If, over several months, different guests began mentioning a characteristic the property barely showed, that could reveal a capability the operation had developed without yet incorporating it into the way the hotel presented itself. If, on the other hand, a difficulty began recurring around something the hotel continued to promise with confidence, the question was different. Responding to each comment separately was no longer enough. We needed to find out whether the external signal still described something the operation was able to sustain.
None of those questions needed to inaugurate a new meeting or create another dashboard. They could fit perfectly well into the conversations a hotel already held in order to manage itself. What changed was what we began to look at when we talked about the operation. A change no longer ended in the department that had produced it when it had consequences for what other people needed to know.
That way of looking also changed some familiar questions. With reviews, we were no longer interested only in whether the rating had risen or fallen, but in discovering what guests were beginning to remember. Faced with an operational change, it was not enough to know whether the team had been informed; we might need to ask whether we were still promising something that no longer worked in the same way, or whether we had learned to do something that no one could yet discover. And when a contradiction began to recur, deciding how to respond to it externally was no longer enough: we needed to understand what it was saying about the hotel that existed inside.
Not all those observations would necessarily lead to a change in communication. Some would reveal exclusively operational issues. Others would require better internal circulation of knowledge. Some would show an exception that justified no change at all. But certain situations would ultimately affect a description, a policy, a photograph, the information available to reservations or some other signal involved in how the property could be understood.
The difficulty lay precisely in preserving that relationship without turning every everyday change into a campaign or every piece of learning into a new promise. A hotel changes every day in ways that do not alter what someone needs to know before choosing it. Managing its understandability could not mean continuously narrating the operation, but recognising when a change ceased to be merely internal.
I returned then to the identity we had been trying to reconstruct from the beginning. We had found it distributed among what the hotel said, the decisions made by the operation, what guests experienced and the signals available outside. If all those dimensions could change, another conclusion became inevitable: a property could transform and continue for a long time to be understood through an earlier version of itself. It could even improve and remain trapped in a poorer representation simply because no one had connected what the operation had learned with what it continued to show.
That was when a question appeared that I do not remember ever hearing formulated in quite that way during the management meetings I had attended over so many years:
Are we still the same hotel outside that we are inside?
I did not expect the answer to be found by looking at a single page, nor did I imagine there could be one person capable of controlling every place where the property was mentioned. After everything we had learned about distributed identity, such an ambition would have been contradictory. Reviews belonged to those who wrote them, the media chose their own angles, platforms organised information according to their own criteria, and many signals would remain available long after the reality that had produced them had changed.
The hotel’s task could not be to make the entire Internet update itself at the same time whenever something happened. It could, however, ensure that what remained under its responsibility continued to provide sufficiently current and precise references for understanding the present. And it could learn to recognise when a difference between an old signal and a new reality deserved clarification, an update or simply context.
Artificial intelligence made that issue particularly visible. A system capable of connecting the official website, reviews, photographs, portals, publications and other sources could encounter different stages of the property’s history at the same time.
A review from years earlier, a photograph still in circulation, a policy reproduced on some profile or an old publication could coexist with recent information. The system could try to recognise dates, compare signals and resolve contradictions, but the property could not assume that every historical trace would automatically cease to have an influence as soon as the operation changed.
Updating the official website remained important, but it could no longer be confused with updating the hotel itself in the digital memory that had gradually formed around it.
Nor did that make artificial intelligence the recipient of management. The hotel did not need to reorganise itself to satisfy a machine. The issue remained the same one that had accompanied us throughout this journey: a person was trying to understand a property before choosing it, and increasingly could do so through systems capable of bringing together information they would previously have had to search for separately. If that information belonged to different moments in the hotel’s history, the existence of current signals could provide stronger references for understanding what the property was today.
I began to understand then that remaining understandable was not a project that could ever be considered finished. Nor was it a task that began when someone decided to redesign the website. It formed part of a continuous relationship between what the operation learned, what it managed to sustain and what remained available to be interpreted from the outside.
That returned responsibility to management, although not necessarily to one particular person. Someone needed to notice that a policy had changed; someone needed to recognise that a capability had become consistent; someone had to listen when a contradiction ceased to be exceptional; and the organisation needed some way of ensuring that those discoveries reached wherever they could alter an internal decision or an external signal. The precise form would differ from one hotel to another. What mattered was that the path existed.
Perhaps that was why, if I were to sit again today in one of those meetings, I would not necessarily add another column to the report or try to turn everything we had discovered into another procedure. I would probably listen differently to some of the conversations that were already taking place. When someone said that a room had changed, I would ask myself who else needed to know. When reception explained that a particular request was beginning to be handled differently, I would try to understand whether that changed only the internal work or also something a guest needed to know before arriving. When several reviews began telling a different story, I would avoid deciding too quickly whether it was a communication issue or an operational one. First, I would try to discover what had changed.
All of that might appear to be an internal matter while we remained seated around the table. But its final consequence occurred some distance from that meeting. Somewhere, there was a person trying to decide where to stay. They did not know about our conversations, did not know what the team had learned over the previous months and had no reason to distinguish an old policy from one that had just come into effect. They were simply trying to understand what hotel stood before them and whether it might be right for them.
After so many conversations, it was becoming increasingly difficult to think that this understanding belonged exclusively to the realm of communication. It also depended on the hotel’s ability to know itself, share what it learned, recognise its limits, correct what had ceased to work and ensure that some of those changes reached, when appropriate, those who were still outside.
But all that work still belonged to what happened before the choice.
Once someone had understood the hotel well enough to choose it, we still had to discover what happened when they finally walked through the door.
Management Perspective
A hotel’s understandability needs to be managed because the operation changes continuously while the signals describing it can remain still. Keeping them current is not exclusively a communications responsibility: it requires the learning, changes, limits and new capabilities emerging across different areas to modify, when appropriate, what the property keeps visible outside.
The objective is not to make every source tell an identical story, but to prevent what can be understood about the property from continuing to describe a version of itself that no longer exists.
The Case Study
In the hotel we have been observing, many of the characteristics we had tried to understand could evolve without initially appearing to have anything to do with its identity. A renovated room, a new condition for coordinating arrivals, an adaptation the team had learned to handle or a difficulty that was beginning to recur could all affect what a future guest needed to know.
The challenge was therefore no longer only to discover what traces the hotel needed to leave, but to ensure that the evolution of the operation found, when necessary, an expression in what could also be understood from the outside.
A Question Before Moving On
When your hotel changes, what makes what others can understand about it change as well?