The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets

by Micah Solomon, Herve Humler (Foreword by)

Overview

Success in today’s rapidly changing hospitality industry depends on understanding the desires of guests of all ages, from seniors and boomers to the newly dominant millennial generation of travelers. Help has arrived with a compulsively-readable new standard, The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets by Micah Solomon, with a foreword by The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company’s president and COO Herve Humler.

This up-to-the-minute resource delivers the closely guarded customer experience secrets and on-trend customer service insights of today’s top hoteliers, restaurateurs, and masters of hospitality management including:

Four Seasons Chairman Isadore Sharp: How to build an unsinkable company culture
Union Square Hospitality Group CEO Danny Meyer: His secrets of hiring, onboarding, training, and more
Tom Colicchio (Craft Restaurants, Top Chef): How to create a customer-centric customer experience in a chef-centric restaurant
Virgin Hotels CEO Raul Leal: How Virgin Hotels created its innovative, future-friendly hospitality approach
Ritz-Carlton President and COO Herve Humler: How to engage today’s new breed of luxury travelers
Double-five-star chef and hotelier Patrick O’Connell (The Inn at Little Washington) shares the secrets of creating hospitality connections
Designer David Rockwell on the secrets of building millennial-friendly restaurants and hotel spaces (W, Nobu, Andaz) that resonate with today’s travelers
Restaurateur Traci Des Jardins on building a “narcissism-free” hospitality culture
Legendary chef Eric Ripert’s principles of creating a great guest experiences, simultaneously within a single dining room.

The Heart of Hospitality is a hospitality management resource like no other, put together by leading customer service expert Micah Solomon. Filled with exclusive, first-hand stories and wisdom from the top professionals in the industry, The Heart of Hospitality is an essential hospitality industry resource.

As Ritz-Carlton President and COO Herve Humler says in his foreword to the book, “If you want to create and sustain a level of service so memorable that it becomes an unbeatable competitive advantage, you’ll find the secrets here.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590794890
Publisher:	SelectBooks
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	522,476
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Micah Solomon is a bestselling author and one of America’s most popular keynote speakers on building bottom line growth through customer service. Micah was recently named the “new guru of customer service excellence” by the Financial Post.

Read an Excerpt

Foreword



There have been volumes written—complete curricula, in fact—that cover the technical, nuts-and-bolts, RevPAR [revenue per available room] side of the hospitality industry. But what about the soul, the heart of what makes great hospitality? How do you create (and sustain) a level of service so memorable that it becomes a defining part of your brand and an unbeatable competitive advantage?



You’ll find many of the answers in the book you now hold in your hands, The Heart of Hospitality. Micah Solomon has put together the only book of its kind: a spectacularly useful, intelligent, and wry look at what determines success in the hospitality industry, packing it throughout with his own insights and the insights of an extraordinary roster of great leaders and practitioners from our industry today.



Micah is one of today’s preeminent thought leaders on where hospitality, customer service, and customers themselves are heading. As an avid reader of his earlier works, I was honored by the invitation to help bring this volume to life, with access to our General Managers, the Ladies and Gentlemen who helm our Leadership Center, our technology initiatives, our branding and marketing efforts, and behind-the-scenes looks at the practices that make our Ritz-Carlton hotels and resorts premier destinations.



The other industry leaders who have contributed their perspectives to The Heart of Hospitality notably include, in lodging, Steve Bartolin at The Broadmoor Hotel, Isadore Sharp at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Mark Harmon at Auberge Resorts, Raul Leal at Virgin Hotels, Mark Hoplamazian and his Hyatt brands, Jennifer Fox at Fairmont, and more. On the culinary side of the equation, you will find insights from notable restaurateurs and others in the world of F&B [food and beverage], including Danny Meyer, Eric Ripert, Tom Colicchio, Patrick O’Connell, Traci Des Jardin, Stephen Starr, and others.



Our industry is both timeless and evolving very rapidly. To achieve and sustain success in hospitality, we must keep pace with changing guests and their changing expectations. Micah explains (at length in chapter 9 as well as throughout the book) what’s involved in making the changes that are necessary to keep up. His predictions and research about how travelers—travelers of all ages and millennials in particular—are changing the world of hospitality are absolutely spot-on and are important to take to heart.



My greatest joy and thrill in life is helping others succeed. I truly believe that The Heart of Hospitality will be instrumental in boosting your outcomes in our exciting industry. Wherever you are in your journey within the hospitality industry, the insights and lessons inside are essential.



Read it, earmark it, highlight it, learn it.



You will be well served.



—Herve Humler
President and COO
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC

Table of Contents

CONTENTS



Foreword by
Herve Humler, President and COO,The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC ix



Introduction xi



1 The Last Customer on Earth 3



2 Systems and Standards: The Secret Weapons of Service 21



3 People Are the Heart of Hospitality 43



4 Building a Culture of Yes 71



5 Developing a Genuine Service Style 99



6 The Power of Authenticity 119



7 Moviemaking and Magic 137



8 The “Chocolate Tastes Better When It’s Being Shared” Theorem 155



9 How the Digital Revolution Has Changed Your Customers 173



Afterword 201



Notes 203



List of Hospitality Leaders Who Were Interviewed by the Author for This Book 207



Index 213



About the Author 224

Editorial Reviews

"Sooner or later, we're all in the hospitality business. I bet you'll find that Chapter 8 alone is worth the cost of the book."



Seth Godin, Author, What To Do When It's Your Turn



"At Virgin Hotels, we are building a new hotel experience–something that can only be done by learning lessons from the greats of our industry and understanding the needs and wants of today's consumers. In The Heart of Hospitality, Micah Solomon--one of the true thought leaders of the customer experience--has gathered unparalleled hospitality wisdom and distilled it in an incredibly readable and useful format. We were delighted to be part of this project and recommend it to any company or individual looking to grow within our industry."



Raul Leal, CEO, Virgin Hotels



"Micah Solomon is one of today’s preeminent thought leaders on where hospitality, customer service, and customers themselves are heading. In The Heart of Hospitality, Micah has put together the only book of its kind: a spectacularly useful, intelligent, and wry look at what determines success in the hospitality industry, packed throughout with his own insights and the insights of an extraordinary roster of great leaders and practitioners from our industry today."



Herve Humler, President and COO, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company



"In this groundbreaking new book, Micah Solomon manages to distill the wisdom of some of America's most enlightened hospitality professionals. He combines the power of their insights with his own refreshing point of view in a compelling narrative style that is concise and to the point. The Heart of Hospitality illustrates that ultimately it is the human connection that builds and sustains guest loyalty. This is an inspirational and useful book for anyone interested in customer satisfaction. Is there anyone who isn't?"



Patrick O'Connell, Chef/Proprietor, The Inn at Little Washington



“An incredibly valuable look at the hospitality industry, hospitality management, and how to succeed with today’s (and tomorrow’s) guests.”

Sara Kearney, Vice President, Hyatt Hotels Corporation



“It’s ironic, but many people and organizations in our industry fail because they lack knowledge and insight for how to provide true hospitality, how to truly care for the guest. That’s why The Heart of Hospitality is so important. It steps in to fill this gap. And it fills it with knowledge from the very best: hospitality icons Isadore Sharp, founder and chairman of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Herve Humler, president and COO of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Danny Meyer, president and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, and so many more. Micah Solomon has interviewed the key executives from hospitality’s best, including those from The Broadmoor and The Inn at Little Washington, Montage, Fairmont, EDITION, and Virgin Hotels and has merged their insights with his own as one of the best and best-known customer service experts himself. Their collective insight focuses on all the key ingredients to deliver an exceptional guest experience - hiring the right people, developing the necessary internal systems and hospitality standards, creating the proper service culture, defining steps for service recovery and visualizing anticipatory service, as well as offering fascinating and essential discussions on how technology has and will change the guest experience."



Bill Quiseng, Hospitality-industry GM (Radisson, Renaissance, Autograph Collection)

“Micah Solomon has gathered all of the great hospitality industry heroes, hotel management practitioners and great restaurateurs together and pulled crucial hospitality management and business insights out of them. This is transformational to the reader who wants to thrive in the challenging world of hospitality and hospitality management.”



Rupesh Patel, President and CEO, 3Hospitality

From the Publisher