#guest-disruptions

#guest-disruptions

Luxury hotels are supposed to provide exceptional hospitality, yet many seem to prioritize profit over guest satisfaction, leading to feelings of exploitation during stays.

'Never ever use these three things in a hotel room,' she warned in a video. Her first tip was to avoid using the 'wall-mounted refillable containers with soap and shampoo' now commonly found in hotel bathrooms.

Athena allows Red Roof to guide its campaign creation, deployment timing and audience development with simple verbal commands, Gharib said.

Restaurant owners like Panjwani are caught in the middle of a growing battle of new and established reservation platforms vying for their business. The two dominant players for more than a decade, OpenTable and Resy, are now facing a wave of fresh competition from high-end services and even delivery apps all trying to win lucrative bookings at exclusive establishments.

Customer service skills define how effectively employees represent a brand and resolve customer needs. In every industry, these skills determine whether a business builds loyalty or loses trust. Customers today expect responsiveness, empathy, and accuracy across every touchpoint-from phone calls and chats to social media interactions.

It isn't a universal truth, but a vast number of goods and services have their own full-circle moments. While there are still plenty of travel agencies in the U.S., the overall number is still down considerably from a peak in the 1980s. For some industry forecasters, though, the future looks a lot like the recent past, except that instead of travelers trusting human agents with making their travel plans a reality, they'll use AI agents for the same purpose.

I was very concerned, very terrified. I still don't believe it's real. Singh, who had a layover in Doha while traveling home from a wedding in India, expressed her anxiety about the situation. Though she's been put up in a luxury hotel, she said it doesn't feel like a vacation because she is constantly updating family and wondering when she'll make it home to Texas.

Customer service in the UK has a problem. According to recent survey data, almost half of UK customers have experienced poor customer service over the past year. That's not a minor data point, but rather a warning sign. Long wait times, unhelpful responses, and automated loops that dead-end are just the beginning, and they erode customer trust quickly. While many businesses have invested heavily in digital tools and AI to help address these problems, that comes with its own drawbacks.

When I tell fellow tech executives that every employee at sunday, from our engineers to our finance team, must complete a restaurant shift before they can fully onboard, I usually get confused looks. "You mean like, shadow someone?" they ask. No. I mean they tie on an apron, take orders, run food, and yes, deal with the 15-minute wait for the check that our product was literally built to eliminate.

Benjamin Nasberg is a Canadian entrepreneur and the CEO of Carbone Restaurant Group. He is known for building scalable hospitality businesses while staying closely connected to the people and communities behind them. His career reflects a steady focus on growth, culture, and practical leadership. Nasberg began working in restaurants at the age of 16. Those early roles gave him a ground-level understanding of operations, teamwork, and customer experience.

As we look ahead, one of the air-travel trends worth watching has to do with airport lounges - and, more specifically, who can and can't access them. Later this year, American Express is updating its policies to make it a little harder for some travelers to access its Centurion Lounges. That's in keeping with broader trends in the industry, which makes it all the more interesting to see an airline going in the opposite direction.

Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it's preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year's time, more than 30% of its total customer support tickets will be handled by AI voice and chat in all the languages where it also employs a human customer service agent.

In the last decade, AI-powered chatbots have taken the realm of customer service by storm.

Artificial intelligence is no longer futuristic-it's functional. Hotels are already utilizing AI to integrate siloed systems, such as PMS, accounting, CRM, and forecasting platforms, to drive faster and smarter decisions. Tools like Placer.ai and PredictHQ help identify ideal customers through demographic, behavioral, and geolocation data. As automation expands, the next opportunity lies in strategic human oversight: consultants and managers will interpret AI outputs, guiding capital investments and operational priorities rather than being replaced by algorithms.

Picture this: a couple walks into a restaurant on a Friday night. They glance around, choose their table, and settle into their seats. Before they've even opened their menus, their server already has a pretty good idea whether they'll leave 10% or 25%. It sounds like mind reading, but after talking with dozens of servers over the years, I've learned it's more like pattern recognition honed by thousands of interactions.

On a recent two-week trip to Japan with my fiancé - six cities, six hotels - every stay was gorgeous and perfectly appointed. We wanted for nothing. Except, in most cases, a proper bathroom door. Instead, we spent the better part of two weeks making accidental eye contact through frosted glass and translucent panels while one of us was otherwise occupied. A design choice, apparently. A test of intimacy, definitely.

Years later, after countless nights in hotels from budget chains to five-star establishments, I've noticed something interesting. Those of us who grew up in lower-middle-class households carry certain behaviors with us into these spaces. They're not necessarily bad habits, but they're telling. They reveal a childhood where every pound mattered and waste was practically a sin. I've seen these patterns in myself, in friends from similar backgrounds, and in countless fellow travelers over the years.