Having been a journalist for 25 years and specialised in hotel business, Maria Pütz-Willems travelled the world for 16 years as a freelance journalist for leading hotel and tourism publications. Always with a certain feeling for trends and ideas and staying in permanent contact with international dialogue partners. In 2005, she launched the online magazine www.hospitaliyInside.com, a bilingual network for international hotel business.
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Friendly employees
They have become very rare – that’s why we now notice them right away, especially in business hotels: friendly employees. That’s the type of employee with a smile. Strangely enough, they appear quite often in vacation hotels and when travelling, I always try to find reasons fort his. Is it because guests stay longer? Or because the hotel has less arrivals to deal with?
All these questions are useless, as a smile can never be limited to certain hotel types. Laughable. “A smile is free and can change many things“ – granny’s old saying is highly up-to-date in the tourism branch. Hotel experts have tried to translate this proverb into strategic battle cries: “Yes, I can!“ is the credo of a global hotel chain, and in order for everyone to remember it, the group has the three words on stickers matching their corporate identity.
Is it necessary, though, to have something pinned onto your blazer that you carry in your heart? No. Those who have a problem with being friendly are those who are not friendly by nature. Everything else comes across as artificial, learned by heart and stiff. Those who like to “serve” automatically put themselves in the guest’s position: a receptionist comforting new arrivals after their long traffic jam, a maid with a huge smile bringing back the blouse with the button sewn on, a waiter organising the kids’ pasta first of all. An honest smile, a bit of compassion and an extra sentence here or there have the power to calm down raging guests, whining children and bossy seniors.
Hoteliers who still see themselves as hosts rather than as managers take good care of their guests and try to avoid a „no“. In practice, as everybody knows, this is not all that easy. A hotel has rules, and guests have to respect rules. Finally, a hotel is nothing else but a large family: there are rules at home, too, just like at work or in society in general.
Professional friendliness coming straight from the heart has many good sides: working in a hotel is more fun, guests smile back and sometimes they even reward a positive attitude with extra tips. And as always, it works best if hotel bosses themselves start the trend.
The roots of friendliness go back to the beginning of humanity. Nowadays, special trainers teach people how to smile, and there are humour and laughter classes, rhetoric seminars and “performance” courses. Just like theatre!
The trend is definitely going back to the real thing, the unaltered. Back to the roots, back to laughter, back to friendliness. In fact, one should try not to talk too much about it – kind of makes you feel like laughing.
:-) Smile! :-)
Yours, Maria Pütz-Willems
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