For several days, I had the feeling that we had arrived somewhere important. After going through the hotel’s information, observing what it said about itself, comparing it with what its guests remembered and looking closely at situations that at first seemed to have nothing to do with one another, a logic had finally emerged that could bring order to much of what we had found: first understand the person; then decide how to look after them.
That formulation was no longer trying to describe a room, a breakfast, a service or even one of the property’s strengths, but something that came before all of them. It helped explain why a late arrival might be handled in a particular way, why a breakfast could be adapted without turning that exception into an extraordinary procedure, why remembering a guest’s name mattered, or why apparently small gestures remained for years in the memories of those who had experienced them. Different situations were beginning to respond to the same logic and, after so many conversations spent trying to understand what made that hotel distinctive, I felt that I could finally explain it without having to list its attributes.
For a while, I thought perhaps the search had ended there. The doubt appeared, however, when I tried to do something quite simple: find that logic again without using anything we had already learned during the analysis.
I opened the hotel’s website again and went through the photographs, the room descriptions, the services and some of the texts I already knew almost by heart. Then I did the same with Google, booking platforms and other sources where the property was mentioned. This time I was not trying to gather information. I wanted to discover whether someone encountering those pieces for the first time could recognise, among them all, the same way of understanding the guest that had taken us so long to reconstruct.
I found many of the words one expects to encounter when exploring the digital presence of a good hotel. Hospitality, comfort, personalised attention, gastronomy, location, facilities. The reviews also contained, scattered among them, many of the episodes that had allowed us to reach our conclusion, and some photographs conveyed an atmosphere that the texts could barely describe. Nothing was particularly wrong, and almost everything had some correspondence with the actual experience. Yet the further I went, the clearer it became that what now seemed essential to us was still difficult to recognise for someone who did not yet know the property.
The difficulty did not arise from a complete absence, because the signals were there, but from the distance that still existed between them. They appeared sufficiently far apart to require someone to bring them together, compare them and give them a common meaning. After everything we had gone through, it was becoming uncomfortable to realise that anyone looking from the outside would have to do a considerable part of the same work to reach a similar conclusion.
For years, that probably would not have seemed particularly serious to me. Choosing a hotel involved precisely that task. Travellers opened different pages, looked at photographs, checked rates, read reviews and returned again and again to the search engine until they had formed their own impression. Part of the process of choosing consisted of organising scattered information and drawing a conclusion from it.
Now that logic was beginning to change. The first conversation in this book was returning, several chapters later, with a meaning I had not yet been able to understand fully at the time. Travellers did not necessarily want to continue gathering every piece themselves. They were beginning to ask, and someone asking which hotel would be most suitable for a particular situation expected something different from a collection of results. They expected someone to understand the context, discard what was irrelevant, connect scattered information and provide a recommendation that already contained part of that interpretive work.
The question was therefore no longer simply what the hotel said about itself. If someone needed to go through twenty reviews, several pages and different publications to understand why that property might be particularly suitable for them, what would happen when they decided to delegate that task?
For a few minutes, I thought the solution might be much simpler than it seemed. Perhaps all we needed to do was write down the idea we had found. We could place it on the homepage, use it in the descriptions and make it the thread running through all the communication: we understand each person before deciding how to look after them.
The phrase was accurate and, precisely for that reason, it began to trouble me. After everything we had observed, it described a genuine characteristic of the hotel reasonably well. But the moment it became a declaration, it began to sound too much like hundreds of expressions any property could use about itself. Personalised service, a unique experience, we take care of every detail, hospitality designed around you. The industry is full of claims that are difficult to dispute and, at the same time, extraordinarily difficult to verify. No hotel presents itself as impersonal, none explains that it pays little attention to its guests, and none admits to offering exactly the same thing as everyone else. We all try to say that we are different, and perhaps that is precisely why difference can no longer depend solely on saying so.
When I retraced the path that had allowed us to discover that logic, a distinction emerged that I had not previously seen clearly enough. We had not arrived at it because the hotel proclaimed it. We had arrived there by following traces.
One guest remembered an adaptation made especially for her; another mentioned the way someone had handled an unexpected arrival; another review referred to a name remembered after several stays and, in different places, small operational decisions began to reveal a particular way of paying attention. None of those signals expressed the complete idea, but together they allowed us to reconstruct it.
A claim could ask us to believe in a characteristic. Something different happened when separate signals, coming from different places, ultimately led to the same conclusion. If a hotel claimed to offer personalised attention, we had a promise. If different services showed an ability to adapt, operational decisions confirmed flexibility, and guests who had never agreed among themselves spontaneously remembered that same sensitivity, personalisation began to become more than a promise and turned into something recognisable.
I began to understand that the next step was not to transform the hotel’s identity into a better phrase. It was to ensure that what we had discovered inside the property left enough traces outside it for someone else to reconstruct it.
The signals did not need to repeat exactly the same words either. A photograph could show what a text could not explain. A description could reveal the kind of need a particular service had been designed to address. A policy could confirm a way of understanding hospitality, while a review could complete, through lived experience, something none of the previous sources could demonstrate on its own. What mattered was not that they all said the same thing, but that bringing them together made it reasonable to reach the same conclusion.
That idea made me think again of the old travel agents. A good agent did not recommend a hotel because they had memorised its brochure. Their judgement was built over time, through conversations, experiences, comments from other travellers and accumulated knowledge of how each property responded to different needs. Something similar happened with the old travel guides. Their authors did not simply reproduce lists of available services; they selected information, interpreted signals and ultimately formed a view of the place.
Search engines had changed that process by placing enormous amounts of information directly in travellers’ hands and, for years, much of the work of interpretation had fallen back on them. Now we were beginning to delegate it again, although with one fundamental difference. Whoever had to understand the property had not necessarily visited it, spoken with its manager or seen its rooms in person. They had to reconstruct it from everything the hotel, its guests and other sources had made available.
It was then that the question that had given rise to these conversations acquired a depth it had not possessed at the beginning.
What does a hotel need to do to be understood before being chosen?
Until then, I had thought that an important part of the answer lay in knowing itself better, discovering what made it distinctive and finding a logic capable of organising its experience. I was beginning to see that this was only half the work.
A property could understand perfectly well who it was behind closed doors and still remain almost indistinguishable from the outside. It could possess a culture recognisable to its team, a particular way of welcoming guests and an experience they learned to value as soon as they arrived, but if those characteristics did not leave sufficiently clear signals in the information available, someone who did not yet know the property would struggle to discover them.
A system attempting to recommend it would face the same problem, not because it was incapable of understanding the difference, but because it would have to reconstruct that difference from traces that were too weak, scattered or contradictory.
A distinction that had seemed natural to me for years was also beginning to lose its clarity. We had learned to think of some things as belonging to operations and others to communication. The hotel did; marketing told the story. Yet if what truly differentiated a property originated in its operation but never managed to leave understandable signals outside it, the problem could hardly be considered purely one of communication. Likewise, if communication constructed an identity that the experience did not confirm, no amount of words could sustain it for long.
The operation generated many of the signals that communication could make understandable, while guests, through what they chose to remember, ultimately confirmed or contradicted both. The more I thought about that relationship, the less sense it made to keep looking for identity in any one of those places separately. True consistency seemed to emerge when they could all be read as parts of the same story.
So I returned to the case study and stopped asking what phrase the hotel should use to explain who it was. The question that emerged was considerably more difficult:
What would someone looking from the outside need to find in order to reach, without us telling them, the same conclusion we had reached from within?
The answer could no longer be reduced to a single line. The description of the property needed to help explain what kind of experience it offered. Services needed to stop appearing merely as an inventory and begin to show what needs they were capable of addressing. Some operational decisions deserved to become visible precisely because they helped explain the proposition, and photographs could show more than well-presented spaces. It was also becoming impossible to ignore what guests said spontaneously because, on many occasions, they were the ones who managed to express through concrete scenes what the hotel still formulated too abstractly.
None of this meant fabricating a new story. That story already existed in the everyday operation of the property. The task was to stop it from appearing fragmented.
For years, I had thought of a hotel’s digital presence as a collection of channels: website, Google, booking platforms, social media, photographs, press coverage and reviews. Now I was beginning to see each of those spaces as a partial observer of the same property. None could contain it completely, but each contributed a piece, and the real problem emerged when, brought together, they seemed to describe different hotels.
A website might promise intimacy while the photographs conveyed something else. A description might insist on personalisation while the policies suggested rigidity. Social media could construct a sophisticated identity while guest reviews remembered entirely different attributes. None of those inconsistencies, taken alone, necessarily damaged reputation, but many small differences produced a quieter effect: they made the property difficult to understand.
And a hotel that was difficult to understand was also difficult to recommend accurately.
By the end of that review, I was no longer concerned with finding the perfect phrase or making every source use the same words. What we needed was considerably more demanding: for someone to be able to encounter them from different places and find, behind their differences, a compatible story. For a review to confirm in its own words what the website had suggested; for a photograph to provide context for a promise; for an operational decision to find continuity in the experience; and for no policy to contradict the hospitality we were trying to communicate.
Only then could what we had discovered inside the hotel begin to be understood from the outside as well.
I returned once more to the formulation with which we had ended the previous conversation: first understand the person; then decide how to look after them. This time, I was no longer interested in finding the most visible place to write it. I wanted to discover how many places could demonstrate it without ever needing to name it.
Management Perspective
A hotel’s identity does not become understandable simply because the property finds the right phrase to describe itself. When its decisions, services, images, policies, content and guests’ memories provide signals that are sufficiently coherent with one another, someone looking from the outside can begin to reconstruct the same logic the hotel recognises within itself. The challenge then ceases to be one of repeating a promise and begins to shift towards something more demanding: leaving enough evidence for that promise to be recognised without having to declare it again and again.
The Case Study
In the hotel we have been observing, we have already found a possible common logic: understanding each guest before deciding how to look after them. We will now try to find that same logic from the outside, returning to the website, booking platforms, photographs, policies and guest reviews to determine whether they contain enough signals for someone who does not yet know the property to reach a similar conclusion without the hotel having to formulate it for them.
A Question Before Moving On
If you removed words such as hospitality, quality, personalised, unique, exclusive and experience from all your hotel’s communication, would there still be enough signals for someone to understand what makes your property different and discover it without you having to explain it?