Are Guests Getting More Difficult These Days? Or Is it Just Rosy Retrospection?

Douglas Kennedy
8/13/2024

As I make the rounds as a vacation rental industry conference speaker and trainer, and as I monitor vacation rental groups on social media, I often hear and read people commenting that today’s guests are more difficult, rude, angry, and conniving than ever before. In recent years, these comments are also attached to a statement such as “Ever since the pandemic ….”

Yet when I reflect on my own experiences working with the public, I just don’t believe this is the case. Looking back on the 11 years I spent as a young child and teenager running the cash register and waiting on customers in my parent’s small retail stores, it’s easy to remember the faces of many rude customers and remember their offensive ways. When I think back to when I was a college student working in hotels as a bellman, banquet waiter, and front desk clerk, and right after that as a first-level manager of the front desk and reservations, I can likewise recall encounters with coarse, surly, and impolite guests, plus quite a number of downright abusive ones.

Although I no longer work behind a counter or bar, nor answer calls from customers, I do spend over a third of my life out there with the traveling public, whether at airline check-in desks, boarding flights, rental car counters, airport buses, or waiting in line at restaurants and hotels. Based on my observations, I just can’t agree that people have become more difficult or rude.

Perhaps a term from the world of psychology can help us understand this perceived trend. “Rosy retrospection” generally refers to a human tendency to remember past events from a more positive perspective than historical reality. Several publications cite the example of a summer vacation experienced in childhood, where we remember the happy parts of wading in creeks, tasty food at family picnics, or enjoying a thrill ride but not the mosquito bites, long lines, or flat tires and car sickness. It is closely related to the concept of nostalgia, but perhaps might be the actual mental processes that allow us to experience nostalgia, by burying forever the memories that were not so rosy! 

Of course, the examples I’ve provided are all anecdotal, but credible evidence an be found in a recent, well-documented research project by psychologists Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert, published in the Nature journal and titled “The Illusion of Moral Decline.” According to their abstract, “Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced.” As to why people think this way, their research sites and links to other extensive research and reports that “… (when) two well-established psychological phenomena work in tandem, they can produce an illusion of moral decline. First, numerous studies have shown that human beings are especially likely to seek and attend to negative information about others, and mass media indulge this tendency with a disproportionate focus on people behaving badly … Second, numerous studies have shown that when people recall positive and negative events from the past, the negative events are more likely to be forgotten, more likely to be misremembered as their opposite, and more likely to have lost their emotional impact.”

From what I observe and read, too many leaders and managers are themselves buying into the illusion that guests are more rude, conniving, and difficult, therefore reinforcing these concepts to one another, and more importantly to the front-line staff who are out there in the trenches and on the firing lines of guest and owner services. 

In other words, the more we talk about this fallacy, the more we reinforce it. The end result is that, increasingly, we come to work every day filled with negative expectations, dread, and anxiety, expecting to encounter rude, difficult, and conniving guests. Due to yet another concept from psychology, referred to as confirmation bias, we find exactly what we seek.

Instead, what leaders should be doing is training their front-line staff to better understand and empathize with guests, to think about the challenges and stress involved with travel itself, and to prepare them to flip the vibe of those they encounter.

Here are some training tips:

• During meetings and discussions, encourage participants to think about what life is like on the other side of the phone lines, textual exchanges, and reception desks. To think about the many human stories that play out, including those that are happy and joyful, but also those that might be stressful, somber, and sometimes tragic.
• When staff encounter difficult guests, be supportive but also remind them that we are all emotional creatures living in a physical world.
• While it’s OK to vent, teach them to avoid ruminating, which psychology teaches us is a negative habit of going over bad experiences again and again in our minds, reliving it each time we retell it.
• Avoid guest-bashing. Now, we do need to acknowledge when the occasional guest does take it too far, but don’t be to quick help label guests as a “Karen” or a “Ken.”
• Always remind staff of the broad spectrum of human personalities. For every truly nasty guest they encounter, chances are they are also going to encounter an especially nice, kind guest.
• Constantly reinforce that it’s basically a numbers game; when you deal with dozens of guests per shift, you’re going to get a few on both extremes, and the choice is ours on which we let into our hearts.

Training, coaching, and mentoring our front-line staff on these concepts will help improve the hospitality vibe at work, help them grow in their careers, and, most importantly, to live more happy lives.