Do Your Vacation Rental Leaders Truly Understand the Difference Between 'Hospitality' and 'Guest Service?'

Douglas Kennedy
1/9/2024

My job as a hospitality industry conference speaker and training facilitator affords opportunities to speak with lodging industry leaders from a broad spectrum of clients. Besides the over 200 vacation rental companies I’ve personally trained over the past few decades, I also get to work with hotel management companies, brands, and independent/boutique hotels. Based on my observations, I think there are a lot of leaders, including some with decades of experience, who do not fully understand the difference between “hospitality” and “guest service.”

I often hear these terms used interchangeably, yet while they are related, and while guest satisfaction requires both, they are fundamentally different concepts. An understanding of the difference, and being able to convey it to front-line staff, is essential for taking both to the next level.  

So, What Is the Difference?

Providing “guest service” is more about delivering experiences that at least meet, and hopefully exceed, guests’ expectations. Foundationally, this requires providing safe, clean, updated, and comfortable rental accommodations. On top of that, excellent guest service requires using communications essentials that rise above merely being polite. A few examples would be:

• Holding eye contact with guests long enough to exchange smiles.
• Using open body language.
• Excellence in telephone communications.
• Personalizing textual message exchanges in SMS text, chat, or email.
• Using guest names conversationally whether in writing, in person, or on the phone.
• Using the language of hospitality, such as saying “Allow me to check on that …” not “I’ll have to check on that …”, “May I suggest that you…” instead of “You’ll have to…”, and saying “You are most welcome” instead of “No problem.” 
• When things go wrong, expressing empathy and apologizing before you start fixing.

And yet I would argue that it is entirely possible for a vacation rental staffer to use all these communications techniques but completely fall short on delivering hospitality. In our daily lives, I’m sure we have all had customer service experiences where the associate said all the right things but who spoke in a way that felt scripted, robotic, and disingenuous. 

For example, if you have ever stayed at an ultra-luxury resort, you may have encountered staff who are so obsessed with passing an inspection that they over-emphasize these “guest service techniques” to the point where it comes across as “scripted politeness” and feels obsequious to guests.

Guest Services Skills Are Demonstrative; Heartfelt Hospitality Is Philosophical

Enlightened leaders know that hospitality is, at its core, a philosophy for living much more so than it is a script or list of “communications standards” to be checked off in a mystery shopper’s inspection report.

To start, let’s look at the root of the word “hospitality” itself. It is derived from the Latin word hospes, which is a word having the diametric meanings of “guest” and “host.” Dictionary definitions of the word “hospitality” generally include some version of receiving guests in a way that is warm, generous, and friendly. 

For decades now in my on-site hospitality training workshops, I often ask participants to work in small groups and to formulate one collective definition. Their results are always interesting and insightful, but the best one yet came out of a group many years ago that came up with this definition: “Hospitality means caring about, as well as for, others.”

In the vacation rental industry, when we care for others, we basically do our jobs. We clean the properties, fix what is broken, and provide a key code in exchange for their credit card. Yet when we care about our guests, we understand that the person on the other side of the door, phone call, or email exchange is a real person going through a uniquely personalized travel experience.

We take time to imagine that they might be in town for a family reunion, a birthday, or the annual family vacation, but also it might be for a “celebration of life” memorial service, a “bucket list” last trip, or the first annual vacation without grandpa.

The definition of hospitality we use is: “Hospitality is the delivery of human kindness, especially to strangers.” 

However, perhaps the very best definition I have ever encountered was offered by a true industry icon, Howard Feiertag, who was my personal mentor and friend for 34 years until he passed away last March at age 93. Howard is well known from the years he spent as a corporate-level hotelier or his years on the conference speaking circuit. Perhaps he is best known as professor Feiertag, having joined Virginia Tech as an adjunct professor in 1990 and where he still taught classes at age 93. 

In my opinion, Howard gave the best and certainly the pithiest definition ever, when he made this comment at a banquet in his honor: “Hospitality is making people feel good,” Howard said that night, adding, “and when we make them feel good, it makes you feel good too!” Note: You can watch this segment of Howard’s speech at the 6:20 timestamp on this YouTube link:  https://youtu.be/5JPa78aDZWM.

And so as vacation rental industry leaders, at your next staff meeting or “lunch and learn,” take a few moments to ask your staff to consider the true meaning of hospitality, making certain to differentiate it from the concept of guest service techniques.

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