The Hospitality Solution in Your Business - Commoncog

This week we’re publishing two cases from Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality:


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/hospitality-solution-business

When reading this I can’t help but relating to a point that Brian Chesky (AirBnb) made on designing The Ten Star Experience.

CHESKY: If you want to build something that’s truly viral you have to create a total mindfuck experience that you tell everyone about. We basically took one part of our product and we extrapolated what would a five star experience *be. Then we went crazy.

This seems like a hospitality solution. I haven’t looked into Airbnb close enough, but I wonder if this is an instance of how process improvement power manifests, or perhaps it’s too soon to tell for Aibnb.

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We’ve already started a sequence of cases on Process Power here but I really should summarise Competing Against Time, to give folks a better idea of what true Process Power looks like. I wouldn’t count this as process power so much as a dedication to process improvement.

Chesky’s pronouncements on the ten star experience is cool, though. But I will also say that I have not experienced it that much in my experiences with the platform.

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Have you come across the Thai brand Divana? It’s a wildly successful super-luxury spa with a customer list full of international royalty and A-list celebrities.

It was founded by some Thai cabin crew members who got laid off from Swiss Air in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The idea of standardization, systematization, protocols, and training from the airline industry became the core of their business. They’ve developed service and operation manuals, setting the details of every part of their business.

I don’t know if there’s any writing about it in English; I came across it in an old episode of The Secret Sauce podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNm66wRLIxc

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I had never heard of this! Thank you for posting — I’ve downloaded the podcast episode and am looking forward to listening :slight_smile:

Ah, I’m not sure if that will be comprehensible. I found a short article in English that gives the basic background: https://www.scb.co.th/en/personal-banking/stories/success-story/divana-spa.html

Edit: ugh. That article doesn’t do a good job of telling about how they grew the operation; very fluffy “go for your dreams” stuff. The podcast was much more interesting with concrete examples of how they approach specific challenges.

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I was actually going to pipe it through some AI translation service :crazy_face:

Thank you for searching for an English language source, though!

Have you, by any chance, visited one of their spas? (Or is it too exclusive / expensive for the ordinary person?)

Oh, a translation service is a great idea.

The prices are not outrageous at all, but I haven’t visited (I’m not based in Thailand).

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