They came to me because their scores had drifted. Not collapsed, just drifted. Still strong, still ahead of the neighbours, but the reviews had started to read as polite rather than warm, and the returning guests weren't returning quite as often.
That is a much harder brief than a broken business. Nothing is obviously wrong. Everyone is working hard. And the thing that's slipping is precisely the thing nobody can see from the inside.
I booked in as a guest
Under my own name, my own card, no notice. I wanted the arrival every other guest gets, not the one they'd have staged if they'd known.
The service was, technically, correct throughout. Everything happened. Nothing was late. And it was completely, quietly impersonal: a sequence of correct steps performed at me. By the second morning nobody had used my name once, and I'd stopped expecting them to.
Their problem was not that standards had dropped. It was that the standards had become the whole job.
The three things we changed
- The first ninety seconds. The greeting had become a check-in script. We rebuilt it so that the first thing that happens to a guest is a person, and the paperwork happens second: sitting down, with a drink, after somebody has asked how the flight was and listened to the answer.
- Handover between shifts. Everything a guest mentioned in the morning was dying at three o'clock when the shift changed. Two minutes of structured handover per section, written down, and suddenly the afternoon team knew it was someone's birthday.
- Permission to deviate. The team was following the SOP because nobody had ever told them what they were allowed to do instead. We wrote down what they could decide on their own, up to a value, without asking, and the floor changed within days.
None of that is expensive. All of it is uncomfortable, because it means telling a team that has been doing everything right that doing everything right is not the point.
How the training actually ran
On the floor, during service, for two weeks. No classroom. I worked sections alongside the hostesses and the servers, and we fixed things in the ten minutes after they went wrong, while everyone could still remember exactly how it had felt.
The supervisors were the hard part and the important part. They'd been promoted for being reliable, and nobody had ever taught them how to correct someone without flattening them. That took most of the second week and it was the single highest-value thing we did.
What moved
Within about six weeks the reviews changed shape. Not the ratings first. The wording. Guests started naming individual people. That is the leading indicator; the scores follow it.
I went back unannounced two months later and had my name used before I reached the desk. That is a smaller thing than it sounds and a bigger one than it looks.
Planning something like this?
Tell me the dates and roughly how you like to travel, and I'll tell you honestly what I'd do with them.