Hospitality, or innkeeping as I call it, is personal. It's intentionally designed to change a specific person at a certain time. It's a crafted set of actions to make someone feel delighted, as if it was made only for them. We treat them as our guest, not as a customer.
Innkeeping, because of its highly personalized nature, its lack of uniformity, is very hard to scale, to make available for everyone. A person is unique. She sees the world differently than another. Innkeeping is our ability to see what she sees and to respond to her specific wants and needs in a specific way. It's a highly curated, bespoke act. And, bespoke by definition is individual.
Of course, it can be done. Innkeeping can be scaled. It begins with seeing our customers as individuals, as guests which we might welcome into our own home. This requires a different posture when we design our systems, technology, processes and our teams. How would we want a good friend to feel at our front door? On the phone? Or, after a service problem?
Innkeeping is hard, really hard. And it's even harder to serve in larger doses to more people. But, if we care enough to do it for one, we've started. We merely need to keep our promise to do it for the next one too.