The Power of Bad by John Tierney & Roy F. Baumeister

Author:John Tierney & Roy F. Baumeister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

The Peak-End Rule

What’s the secret sauce? Adele Gutman gets asked that question a lot. She is the mastermind behind the success of the Casablanca as well as the half-dozen other boutique hotels of its parent company, the Library Hotel Collection. The hotels in New York, Toronto, and Prague all rank perennially in TripAdvisor’s top ten for their cities, and the one in Budapest, the Aria, took TripAdvisor’s annual award in 2017 as the number one hotel worldwide.

So Gutman has been barraged with queries from other hoteliers and invitations to give master classes at trade conferences. She can talk the business-school talk, expounding on “best practices in reputation management” and offering mantras like “Service Is Marketing,” but there’s one phrase she keeps coming back to: “sparkling sunshine.” She says it with a smile and a fluttering of her perfectly manicured fingers to illustrate the sunshine her staff is sparkling over every guest.

“You have to double up on the good things,” she says. “If you manage to connect with every single guest, you’ve given yourself an insurance policy against bad reviews because they’re not likely to say something negative about somebody who’s their friend. You have to go over the top so they forget the bad things. I never use phrases like ‘meeting people’s expectations’ or ‘satisfying customers.’ I say ‘sparkling sunshine,’ and our staff gets exactly what I mean.”

There is nothing haphazard about this sunshine. It’s a system she developed after taking over the marketing of the Casablanca and its sister hotels in 2005, when they were ranked lower on TripAdvisor. She realized that they couldn’t compete with low-end hotels for price or high-end hotels for luxury. They were small hotels with a sense of style—the Casablanca had a Moroccan theme taken from the Humphrey Bogart movie—but they didn’t offer palatial suites or sweeping views. She also knew, though, that luxury was not the formula for getting to the top of TripAdvisor’s rankings. Deluxe hotels in New York like the St. Regis and the Plaza were routinely outranked by cheaper hotels because their guests expected so much and would find something to complain about. The secret to making that crucial first web page on TripAdvisor was to avoid negative reviews.

After studying the reviews, she drew up a list of all the “contact points” between a guest and the hotel, from making the reservation to checking out, and resolved to sparkle sunshine at every point. The front desk started keeping a diary listing every request or complaint from a guest and how it was handled. Gutman focused on hiring cheery extroverts and coaching them to engage the guests whenever possible. The telephone reservation agents at the Casablanca don’t just book a room; they ask why the guest is coming to New York and if there’s anything special they need.

From the doorman to the front-desk clerk to the bellhop, everyone is supposed to beam—“Welcome to our hotel!”—and treat the guest’s arrival as a singularly delightful treat: “Oh, this is your first time in

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