You want to create a hotel your guests will never forget, and wellness feels like the answer. So you look at what the best properties are doing, follow the trends, hire a top-notch wellness director and deliver excellent experiences.
Yet your hotel is still forgettable. Excellent, but forgettable.
If it isn’t the wellness offering, the team or the guests, then what is it? You must be wondering.
It’s what I call the Vision Ceiling: your hotel can never be more unforgettable than the vision of the person leading it.
So the real question is this: how do you push that ceiling higher?
Let me tell you how I learned about the notion of the Vision Ceiling.
When I looked back at the boutique hotel owners I’ve loved working with most, the ones whose hotels became truly unforgettable, I noticed that almost none of them came from hospitality or wellness. Not one had been trained in “how things should be done.”
And then there was me, the expert. I knew exactly how a treatment room should be designed and how a client flow should work. If a room came out slightly different from the drawings, or guests used a space in a way we hadn’t planned, I would get disappointed, because I was holding on so tightly to “how things should be done.”
Meanwhile, these owners were having the time of their lives. I remember one owner who insisted on putting the hydrotherapy areas inside each changing room, so the sauna, steam room and vitality pool were all single-sex. They didn’t want guests dealing with the opposite sex or couples. For them, this was meant to be a truly relaxing experience. I’d suggested a shared area, but I understood where they were coming from.
Lo and behold, when the wellness area opened, couples kept asking to be together. So we had to close off a changing room for 20 minutes at a time so a partner could join them in the sauna. And I was thinking, “See? I told you so.” But to them, it wasn’t a failure. It was simply something they’d learned. “Let’s try something else, so we can give our guests the experience they want.”
So we got creative. During the quieter hours, we closed off the hydrotherapy area and turned it into a private ritual for couples, with a glass of Cava to finish. Just as many hotels have a children’s hour, we created a couples’ hour. Guests loved it.
And here’s the part that humbled me. The single-sex areas I’d been so sure were a mistake turned out to be one of the things guests praised most, particularly top executives, who simply wanted some precious time to themselves.
So the “mistake” I’d been so quick to point out became two signatures: a private sanctuary people treasured, and a couples’ ritual they looked forward to. The owner wasn’t wrong. They just found their way there by painting over the first brushstroke.
And here’s what struck me most. They weren’t careless. They were obsessive about how they wanted their guests to feel. They just didn’t mind how many attempts it took to get there. They loved the mess. They loved the learning. They knew exactly where they were heading, even without a map, and they were enjoying every wrong turn on the way up.
That’s when it clicked. The more we know how things should be done, the more our vision shrinks to fit what’s already been done.
Expertise lowers the ceiling. Lightness lifts it.
It’s a bit like painting, one of my favourite pastimes when life and work get too serious. I put on my overalls and paint away, often without knowing what I’m painting. Now, nothing I’ve made will be hanging in the Thyssen anytime soon. But I love every minute of it, and that’s exactly the point.
In today’s episode, I’ll uncover:
1.- Why the Vision Ceiling decides how unforgettable your hotel can be, and why even the best wellness director or an entourage of top consultants can’t raise it for you
2.- Why taking things too seriously keeps your hotel vanilla, and what the owners behind unforgettable hotels do instead
3.- My PAINT methodology from my new book, Felt Not Forgotten, which shows you how to create an audacious vision, hold it, and see it past the finish lin, with the same playfulness you’d bring to a blank canvas.
By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to dream bigger than your expertise allows, find the people who’ll build it with you, and enjoy the mess along the way.