Somewhere along the way, a significant part of the hospitality industry confused efficiency with absence.
I want to be precise about what I am criticising here, because this is not an argument against efficiency. Streamlining is healthy. Cutting genuine waste, removing redundant processes, modernising clunky back-office systems, all of that deserves applause, not resistance. I have spent decades pushing for exactly this kind of intelligent operational discipline.
What I am criticising is something else. The quiet, steady stripping away of the human element from hotels, dressed up in the language of efficiency, when in truth it is simply cost-cutting that has run out of better ideas.
The tell is always the same
You can usually spot it within thirty seconds of walking into a lobby. Nobody greets you. The desk is unmanned, or manned by someone visibly juggling four other responsibilities at once. A QR code invites you to check yourself in, as though the entire point of choosing a hotel over an apartment rental was the absence of a single human being who might actually help you.
I am not romanticising the past for its own sake. But a hotel, by definition, by the very root of the word, was always meant to be a place where you are hosted. Remove the host, and what remains is simply a building with beds in it. You have not innovated. You have quietly reclassified your product.
The spreadsheet does not see what it is cutting
I understand the pressure. Margins are tight, labour costs are real, and every General Manager I respect has, at some point, faced a spreadsheet demanding headcount reductions. The instinct to comply is not stupidity. It is survival under pressure.
But here is what the spreadsheet cannot see: the concierge who remembers a guest’s anniversary without being prompted. The doorman who notices an elderly guest struggling before anyone asks for help. The night manager who quietly resolves a crisis at 2am so the guest never even learns there was one. None of this appears as a line item. All of it disappears the moment you decide that role is “no longer essential.”
And then, a strange thing happens. Guest satisfaction scores quietly decline. Online reviews shift from describing an experience to describing a transaction. Loyalty erodes, slowly enough that nobody can point to a single decision and say, that is the moment we lost them. By the time the damage is visible in the numbers, the institutional knowledge that built the original reputation has usually already walked out the door, taking decades of relationship capital with it.
Efficiency and dehumanisation are not the same project
This is the distinction the industry keeps blurring, and I think deliberately so, because it is convenient. Genuine efficiency removes friction. It makes the guest experience smoother, faster, less burdened by unnecessary process. Automating a billing reconciliation that used to take three people a full day is efficiency. Removing the person who used to walk a nervous solo traveller to their room and check the door locked properly behind them is not efficiency. It is abdication, wearing efficiency’s clothing.
A genuinely well-run hotel uses technology to free its people to do more of the human work, not less. The mobile check-in should exist so the now-unburdened front desk team has more time for the guest who actually needs a real conversation, not so that team can be quietly reduced to a single person covering three roles.
What gets lost is rarely recovered cheaply
Organisations that hollow out their human element to protect quarterly margins are making a trade they rarely understand the full cost of. Service culture, once eroded, is brutally expensive and slow to rebuild. You can rehire staff in a month. You cannot rehire institutional memory, trained instinct, or a reputation for genuine hospitality that took a generation to earn, in anything close to that time.
I have walked through enough properties, in enough countries, to recognise which ones still understand this and which ones have quietly given up on it while insisting, in every press release, that they have not.
The hotels that will matter in ten years will not be the ones that cut deepest. They will be the ones disciplined enough to streamline real waste while having the courage to protect the one thing no algorithm has yet managed to replace: a human being who is genuinely glad you walked through the door.
That is not nostalgia. That is the entire business model.