Erik de Wit: ‘Somewhere along the way we kind of lost the soul of the business’

After almost 37 years in the hotel industry, I will say goodbye to daily hotel life this summer. At 29, I was at the helm of a hotel for the first time, soon I will wave goodbye as General Manager of the Bilderberg Parkhotel Rotterdam. Not because I am fed up with the profession, on the contrary. I continue to find this perhaps the most beautiful profession in the world. But it is a profession in which you are always ‘on’. And after all these years, this feels like a good time to make some more room for other things.

By the way, I prefer to call myself innkeeper rather than hotel manager. That may sound a bit romantic or old-fashioned, but for me, that is still the essence of hospitality. And that is exactly where the modern hotel business sometimes falters. Somewhere along the way, we have somewhat lost the soul of the profession. Or more precisely: we have allowed ourselves to be partly optimised away. Fortunately, not everywhere and all the time. But more often than we should.

We are building smarter hotels, more efficient processes, nicer dashboards and better and better systems. We let guests check in themselves, check out themselves, order themselves, pay themselves and, soon, probably complain themselves to an AI chatbot that responds “understandingly”. Meanwhile, we call it progress. And it ís, in part. Don't get me wrong: you can't make it these days without technology. Margins are under pressure, staff are scarce and the world is changing faster than ever.

But somewhere between the spreadsheets, KPIs and revenue meetings, something important is in danger of disappearing: the soul of the business. At its core, a hotel is still a place where people want to feel welcome. Where a guest walks in after a long day and thinks: fine, here I am at home for a while. That feeling is rarely created by a perfect system. It is created by people.

By the receptionist who senses that someone has had a bad day. By the waiter who sees that a table is waiting just a little too long. By a housekeeping employee who understands that attention is sometimes more important than speed. Hospitality lies in details that cannot be automated. Yet in the Netherlands we have sometimes become uncomfortable with service. As if service is something old-fashioned. Or subordinate. While in fact it is a profession. A wonderful profession even. In countries like France or Morocco, people understand this much better. There, good service is something to be proud of. Here, we quickly call it a student job, which I think is a shame. Because at the end of the day, guests rarely remember how efficient your process was. They remember how they felt. That's the real business we're in. I was recently in a beautiful luxury hotel in Italy. Truly everything was right. Beautiful room, marble bathroom, fantastic bed. But after the first night, you had to pay extra for extra coffee cups in the room. Then I still think: guys, somewhere here someone has fallen in love with Excel and forgotten what hospitality is all about. That tension will always exist. Of course a hotel has to be profitable. Of course the P&L has to be healthy. But as soon as the system becomes more important than the guest, we strike out. And maybe that doesn't only apply to hotels. Look at healthcare, education, actually any sector where people should be central. Everywhere you see the same battle between efficiency and attention.

Let's embrace technology and give the time it generates back to our guests. For me, that is where the future of hospitality lies: technology that does not come between people, but instead makes room for real attention, personal contact and genuine hospitality.