Twenty years in hospitality including The UK, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Backpacker hostels to five-star hotels and in all of it, I have never once seen emotional intelligence formally taught, measured or rewarded.
What I mean by emotional intelligence in this context is not complicated, it is the thing that makes a good member of staff notice the couple at table six who have barely spoken for twenty minutes and quietly adjust how they approach them. It is understanding that the guest who snapped at check-in probably needed someone to acknowledge them rather than just process them efficiently. It is the difference between a team member who hears a complaint and one who actually resolves it.
Every operator who has been doing this long enough knows exactly what I am talking about. We can spot it in an interview, we can spot it in the first ten minutes of someone working a floor, we describe it constantly in every conversation about hiring, “great people skills,” “good with guests,” “natural warmth,” “strong instincts,” we just never call it what it is.
Hospitality has always treated emotional intelligence as something you either have or you do not. It is personality, it is character, it is not a skill that can be taught or developed. That belief is convenient, because it means nobody has to be accountable for it. Nobody has to track it, develop it or reward the people who demonstrate it every shift, it simply exists, or it does not.
The problem is that this is wrong because emotional intelligence can be developed. More importantly, it can be measured, we just never built the tools because we decided it was not that kind of thing.
The staff who are high in it are the ones your guests ask about by name. They turn a single visit into several, they catch a complaint before it leaves the building and becomes a public review and they are also, in my experience, the ones most likely to leave without much warning, because nobody ever told them how good they were or gave them anything to show for it.
The staff who are lower in it are not bad people, they are just people nobody ever helped. The industry hired them, put them on a floor and moved on. When things go wrong, the same people tend to be involved and that pattern gets treated as a personality problem rather than a development gap, which means it never gets properly addressed.
Meanwhile we can tell you the RevPAR of every room in the building, we have software tracking sentiment across every review platform, cost per cover, average daily rate, occupancy forecasts. For every financial metric that matters, there is a tool but for the human factor that actually drives all those numbers, there is nothing. We rely on gut feeling, annual appraisals and the occasional staff survey that everyone fills in with one eye on their manager.
Let us be honest, that is not measurement, that is guesswork with a paper trail.
I worked at Grantley Hall in North Yorkshire. The standard of emotional intelligence among the team there was extraordinary, being part of the leading hotels in the world it was an unspoken requirement. It was enforced through culture and expectation. If you had it, you were valued, if you did not, you quietly disappeared. Nobody tried to understand why someone had it or how to help someone develop it, the culture was strong enough that it did not need to.
That works when you can afford to be that selective but most hospitality businesses cannot. Independent hotels, guesthouses, restaurants and venues running on tight margins and small teams do not have a culture so powerful it does the work for them, they need something more practical.
When I raise any of this, the response is usually the same, the industry is under enough pressure already. Margins are too tight, there is no headspace for anything that does not feel immediately operational, I understand that but I do not fully accept it.
The people who leave your business are mostly not leaving because of pay, they leave because they feel invisible and because nobody noticed how good they were until after they had already decided to go. Staff turnover in hospitality is brutal and expensive and most owners accept it as a cost of doing business because they do not realise a lot of it is preventable.
The experiences that make guests actually come back have almost nothing to do with the physical product. The room was fine, the food was fine but the person who made them feel genuinely welcome, who remembered something small from the previous evening, who handled a problem so well the guest mentioned it in the review three days later. That is what drives loyalty and that interaction is invisible in almost every piece of data we currently collect.
The businesses that come out ahead in the next few years will not be the ones with the most sophisticated revenue systems, they will be the ones that figured out how to build teams who genuinely care, kept them longer and gave them a reason to stay. Emotional intelligence is at the centre of all of that. It always was, we just never treated it that way but maybe now is the time in a world where consumers are more stringent with paying for experiences especially in the hospitality industry.
