Let's Return To The Art of Hospitality - Bashar Wali, Practice Hospitality

Josiah: Have you ever wondered why some hotel stays leave a lasting impression while others are forgotten the moment that you check out? There are few better qualified to answer this question than Bashar Wali, CEO of Practice Hospitality and this assembly, because every single night he travels, Bashar stays in a different hotel so that he can learn from everyone. In New York City alone, he's stayed at 249 properties, so he's seen it all, and he's joining us here today to challenge everything that you think you might know about guest experience. In this episode, Bashar shares why shock and awe tactics often fall flat, the simple gesture that can elevate a routine check-in to something more memorable, why true loyalty isn't earned with points, but with something far more profound that really taps into our human nature, what we can learn from the world of theater, and much, much more. It's time to discover the art of hospitality and unlock the secret for creating unforgettable connections, one guest at a time. So let's get into it. 

Josiah: Has someone done something for you that was thoughtful and intentional recently that stands out? And if so, why?

Bashar: I mean, sadly, as you know, very, very, very rare that that happens. So when it happens, it's exponentially more surprising and delighting than when, you know, happens regularly. I'm trying to think about recent examples. I've talked a lot about a bunch of examples that have happened to me in the past, given my neurotic travel. And for those listening that may not know, my neurotic claim to fame is I never stay in any hotel more than once or one night. So three nights in New York, three different hotels every time I'm on my 249th hotel in Manhattan as we speak. And I've done that in every other city in the world. And, you know, I've run out in many cities and now I repeat. So with all that travel, you would think I would experience it more. Now, people push back on me and say, well, how do you expect us to know you and surprise you if you don't give us another chance? And I'm saying you have one chance to make a first impression. If you do it in my one stay, I will delightfully break my rule and cheat and come back to you. And I've done that in places that I've done that. I don't know if I mentioned this the last time we talked, I was in Bangkok with a friend and his daughter and me and my daughter were doing like a father daughter trip for spring break. And anywhere I stay, I never have my assistant call or drop names or do you know who I am? I literally do it anonymously online because I want to experience the whole thing. And yes, I'm going to your hotel website because I know better than to go to the OTA, except that every time I go to your hotel website, you're like fighting me to not book through you. Like when I get to the zip code field, for the love of God, change my keyboard for me. Don't make me do it because you're going to lose me. You are going to lose me anyway. So I show up at W Hotel Bangkok. I'll happily give them a shout out. We leave for the night. We come back. Their thing is this boxing teddy bear is their thing for that hotel. I don't exactly know why, but it's their thing. We come back and in the room there are four teddy bears wearing their boxing robes that have our names embroidered on every single one of them. And there's a little note card from the person who sent it. He says, I am grateful you're staying with us. I've listened to your TED Talk and I use it often in my training. I am so appreciative you picked our hotel. I am yours for life. You don't have to be that good, by the way. I will forgive a lot of your physical ailments as a hotel, small room, et cetera. Because at the end of the day, I'm not taking any of that with me. Home. What I'm taking home with me is the hospitality, the feeling you invoke in me. And imagine me walking into this room with my friend and the two ladies with us, our daughters. I'm king of the world. I feel so special. So it's so simple yet so many people fail at it because we've become an industry of shock and awe. We want to throw things at you. We want to give you big things, big gestures that are meaningless. I don't care about your chateau, whatever bottle of wine. It's meaningless in the scheme of things. because it's a mathematical equation. You have a list that says VIP, VIP level one gets this bottle of wine and this fruit tray, done. That's not me. But the guy who went and did this for me, he recognized me for my humanity, not my status as a VIP. Never told him, never said anything. Someone looked at the arrivals list and did that. One night I was there. So those are the things that are memorable. And I think, again, as an industry, we have gone so far away from that. We talk a big game. about personalization and taking care of the guests and really focusing on all of that. But all we're doing literally is we're throwing artifacts at you. We talk about services, you know, service is something you deliver. And this is something I've been preaching for 10 years. And today a robot does deliver a service in a hotel. If I'm in New York, I order an extra towel, literally a little R2D2 thing comes to my room and deliver me a towel. Great. I don't need to engage with anyone. If I want a towel, I'm either coming out of the shower. So I don't want to go through all that trouble. So that is great. The robot, in some cases.

Josiah: Perfect.

Bashar: In some cases, that's a perfect use for that technology. But when I come to check in, and I've done it in Tokyo at the Dinosaur Robot Hotel, whatever, and I have some robot checking me in, sorry, that doesn't work. So service is something you deliver, and a robot can deliver a service. Hospitality is how you make people feel. And robots, again, for the time being, and I never say never, until we can teach robots empathy in human and emotional intelligence, that feeling thing is exclusive to humans and animals, I'd argue, in some cases, you know, a little puppy runs to the door at a hotel. I'm a sucker, you've won me, right? So I think, again, as an industry, we have gone so far, the pendulum has swung so far towards service and services to the cost of hospitality, and we've swung to shock and awe to the detriment of thoughtfulness and intentionality.

Josiah: You've spoken before about the importance of memorability being a way to measure effective hospitality. If shock and awe, why is shock and awe bad then if it feels like that's going to be memorable, you can do something over the top.

Bashar: I'll give you a great example. I am at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and I'm happy to drop names anyway, good or bad. I walk into the room and in the mini bar there is a walk of shame kit. Flip flops, t-shirts, toothbrush. I'm alone. Cute, right? It's funny. It's kind of cute. Next time I'm there, I'm there with my eight-year-old daughter at the time. Walk of shame kit is no longer cute. Either lock it, say you're an adult-only hotel. So that's when shock and awe is okay sometimes as long as it's thoughtful and intentional. If you're an adult-only hotel, check. But you're not, and it's not behind lock and key. So eight-year-old dad, what's a walk of shame? Not cute anymore. And I use that as an example because someone with good intentions was very creative and came up with this thing. Goodest to them, super creative. They weren't thoughtful about the intended audience. We do this a lot with gender too, because we're often only focusing on men, men, men, men, men, men. Then when a woman comes and it breaks, we're like, why did it break? It works because women are 50% of the population. I'll give you the exact story about this example out of the hospital industry about shock and awe without thoughtfulness or intention or intentionality. American airlines has the concierge key program that George Clooney up in the air. If you've seen that movie, you know what that means. Invite only top, top, top travelers. And if you get that status, you are king of the world. If you're boarding the plane and you're concierge key before military or families or handicap or anything, they board you first. And they used to call you out by name. So it's a Bashar Wali. Thank you for being an amazing customer. You're the reason we fly. Please come board. Bashar perks up like a peacock, sashes down the jetway. Look at me. Now there's a single woman traveler. Again, they're 50% of the population and they're 48% of the business travel population. Women are. Woman comes to board, she's concierge key, they call her by her full name. She walks up to the counter, she says, you stupid morons. Do you know how many stalkers I will now have on the internet because of you? Thank you, please don't call my name out anymore. Just do concierge key and I'll happily board. So again, you can imagine that boardroom at American Airlines where lots of suits were sitting, including women who say, how do we take care of those customers that give us 80% of our business? Let's call them by name. And even though they're sitting there, they're like, someone should have said, guys, women. Let's think about them, they don't want them. So again, often we forget to take the thing all the way through and think about the unintended consequences, like the Walk of Shame kit, because we're not thoughtful.

Josiah: I've been working the last couple of months on a research project that was talking to hotel managers around the globe, and by and large, they're telling me it is harder than ever to build strong guest relationships. Is that your belief? Is it harder than ever to build guest relationships?

Bashar: I think it's easier than ever, because people love talking about themselves, and they do it publicly on social media now. And you have the tools to allow you to scrape and learn something about them. And people think good hospitality is reserved for the luxury segment. I love using this example that I use often. You and your wife are checking into a day's inn. You're at the desk paying $59. The person at the desk overhears you say that it's your daughter's fourth birthday that's with you. You go up to your room, she checks you in. That person on her own, it's not an SOP, goes to a vending machine, buys a Snickers bar for a dollar, takes a sticky note and says, happy birthday, Emily, and delivers it to your room. Blown away. What that requires is isn't training, that's culture, that's emotional intelligence, that's empathy. We focus on the wrong things. We as an industry do mystery shops. I talk about this all the time. And a mystery shop is a list of 100 questions that you give to some random person to check into your hotel and check those boxes. And I've always held the position that I could crush that taste, ace it, and be the most miserable human you ever met. What are you accomplishing? But did you use the guest name three times? I already know my name. Don't use it. Thank you. Did you offer a luggage service? I have a tiny little bag with me. I don't need you to offer me luggage service. Use your brain, emotional intelligence. So now what we do is we mix the transactional with an emotional based shop where we'll say no lists. How did they make you feel when you check in? Did they make you feel welcome? When you had a problem, did they show you enough empathy that they care? Not every problem can be fixed. Make no mistake about it. Guests have some crazy things they come up with. I cannot fix every problem. All I need to do is pretend enough to convince you I care and I've won you. So I think the issue today is obviously labor has been a major issue. And again, ignoring COVID for a minute, which caused a whole lot of other circumstances and other issues that we had not planned on. I feel that today, given how much we know about you, It's easy. The bar is low. I'm going to give you a quick story. And I give credit to this story to Alex Cabanez, the executive chairman of Pyramid Hutong Group. Dear friend, he talks about this example where you're getting up to take a business trip. You're getting up at four o'clock in the morning. You're pissing off your wife that you just woke up. you're stepping on your kid's Legos and scream your bloody murder, you're rushing to get out of the door, you get in the Uber with the smelly guy who wants to have a conversation at 5 a.m., you get to the airport, you go through security, you get shoved through like cattle, literally like you're an animal, you sit on the plane and every moron who's walking down the aisle with their backpack is whacking you in the head because people have zero self-awareness, you land where you're going, you repeat the same process again, and now you walk up to the front desk. And what do I do? Eyes down. You're an interruption in my day. I'm looking down. And what do I say to you? Checking in. What the fuck do you think I'm doing? Now imagine that moment. Imagine that moment. If you walked up to me and I abruptly, intentionally, theatrically stopped everything I'm doing, put my hand on my heart and I said, welcome. You're here. We got you. By the way, I've just trademarked this term for my management company. The sentence, anyone can take your luggage. We handle your baggage. Because when you come to a place like a hotel, again, I'll give credit to Sean McPherson, my major crush hotelier in New York. He's done amazing hotels, the Chelsea, the Bowery, the Ludlow, amazing, amazing human. a very private, I was fortunate enough to interview him for an event I was hosting. And he said, look, when we go, when I go to a coffee shop to buy a $14 latte or an Erawan, a $42 latte, if it were, I don't go there for the latte. I can press a button at home and for 25 cents, get an equally good latte. We all go to those places, including hotels and restaurants, because they're a respite from our day. For a moment, you can pretend you're living in a magical world where all your worries are gone and someone is attending to you and taking care of you. And hotels, again, we fight you, like we fight you. We constantly want to fight you. Stand there and just welcome them in.

Josiah: There's a… I have to follow up on this though. You said you're kind of gesturing, so I'll include video if people are just watching the audio or listening to the audio here, but you put your hand over your heart. Yeah. Welcome. You've said before you're in the theater business. Do we need to be a little more theatrical?

Bashar: 100%. And here's why. I stay in a hotel, I pay $100 or $1,000, doesn't matter. I take nothing home with me, right? Maybe I steal a towel at best, right? When you go to the theater and you're dropping nowadays, whatever theater costs, good Lord, you take nothing home with you. If we don't manage in a small way to capture you and give you a reason to go home and talk about it. When you go to the theater, the building could be spectacularly beautiful, but if the play flops, it doesn't matter. The building doesn't matter. That's not why people are going. Exactly. You're not taking it home with you. Unless I give you a reason to make it memorable, I failed miserably. And hotels are like a theater, right? You don't go there for the… You need shelter, right? Shelter is at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of need. It is the very basic human need, physiological need. You need it. We provide it, check. But if we're just that, we're dead. Because you know how I buy my commodities? I buy them on two principles only. Location and price. If I need gas for my car, I don't care what the logo for Exxon is or what the tagline for Shell is. I care about convenient location, good price. And if that's the category we fall in, we're dead. So if we don't figure out how to play this theater angle and give you a reason to remember us and talk about us through our interactions with you, because remember, the theater makes it memorable with its cast and characters. It doesn't make it memorable through its building or its flyer or whatever. And I think that's where we really, really fall short, because we think we're in the service industry. We are not in the service industry. We're in the feelings business. How do I make you feel when you leave my hotel? I think I've mentioned before, with my exhaustive travel globally, I don't look at diamonds, I don't look at Michelin keys now, I don't look at stars. I say there's literally only two kinds of hotels, memorable or forgettable. And a day's inn could be memorable, I don't care. It's not five stars, it's not five diamond, but someone made it memorable because of the thing they did, not the thing that they are. And that's a big thing.

Josiah: How do you decide what hotels to stay at?

Bashar: Well, I'm not a good person to ask because I just have a list and I'm going through it. Whatever hotel I haven't stayed at is what I'm doing. And shout out to New York, by the way. I have a couple left. Aman, who wants too much money. So Aman, if you're listening, I'm in. Fifth Avenue hotel support. Amazing. I've seen it. I haven't stayed there. And RH Guesthouse, the restoration hardware. Oh, that's a good one. I mean, honestly, I think I'm down to those until Faena opens in New York in six months. I'll hit that. But I'm pretty much out. I've stayed at all of them.

Josiah: I'm trying to connect the themes of what you shared. I'm trying to wrap my head around why are so many hotel managers, hotel leaders saying it's harder to build guest relationships now. Maybe it's a people issue, maybe it's a staffing issue. If the technology is there, if you had to guess.

Bashar: It is a staffing issue. People mistake that I don't need to do something special for every single one of my guests in 500 rooms when I'm a full occupancy. It's unreasonable. It's impractical. You'll go bankrupt. You just have to do enough to get inertia and make it become the norm, not the exception. Because when it becomes the norm, it's not hard to be nice to someone and put your hand on your heart and stop everything you're doing. I don't care what it is. I was going to give you the example. There's a tire company here in the Northwest called Les Schwab. And Les Schwab's shtick, and it is a shtick, when you're driving your car up to the store, before you've parked, someone will not walk, run out of the store, run to your window to ask you what you need and guide you. Such a simple gesture that it is a gesture because now people say, oh my God, this place is amazing. For all I know, they're charging you more. For all, it doesn't matter because now you feel like, oh my God, because you don't go into any of those places. Imagine bank or DMV or whatever. And people think it's about bodies. It's not about the bodies. The body is there. It's about creating a culture that celebrates those things that employees do and rewarding them for it. And by the way, the reward is what you see on the guest's face when you do something for them. But yes, practically speaking, I'm an operator. I want to be pragmatic here and say, you can't do this for everyone. And sometimes you're short-staffed and we're an industry of a revolving door. People come and go. It really is about creating a culture. It's not about training program. Again, you can train a monkey, you can train a robot. But you can't do that emotional intelligence and that self-awareness and intentionality and thoughtfulness except with humans. And you don't have to please every single person that walks through your door to that level. There's a basic minimum level, but then from there is creating inertia. That's the only way I can describe it is it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and then you start seeing employees competing to do more. Now, you have to give them Fritz van Paschen, ex-CEO of Starwood, Coors Light, Nike, Europe, amazing, Coors Brewing, amazing guy. I love the term he used when he was at Starwood. He'd say, you have to give people flexibility within a framework. But what we want now is we want ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen, read the following credo card and have used the guest name three times and, and, and, and just be nice. Like that's all we're asking. Maybe be nice. How would you want to be treated? Do onto others as you want done onto you. It's an old adage that wisdom never gone out of style. Yeah. Just be nice.

Josiah: It's, it seems so simple. Um, yeah, no, I, I love that. Um, you know, you mentioned we're sharing more and more of our lives and preferences online. But if you're visiting a property for the first time, that sometimes can be a challenge to know, how do I know what Bashar wants? You're also an operator on top of other things that you do. How do you think about capturing, I guess, guest preferences and kind of things if they might not know that you want your room at 64 degrees?

Bashar: I mean, look, technology in our industry is not our strong suit. We're trying to catch up, but we've forever been archaic in what we use and the systems that we use and the way we collect data. But I am dumbfounded that Marriott does not have a data scientist department with five MIT PhDs in there sitting and going, we know so much about these people. What do we do with it? And that's the example I use. I'm titanium elite on Marriott. I've stayed in more Marriotts than I care to tell you. You should know by now, by now, no matter where I stay across the globe, that I like my room cold. And you should, not every time, but at least enough times, remotely from a desk. You don't have to send anyone to the room. We could do it remote. Do it and take credit for it. This technology is here. It's been here for a decade. Do it and take credit for it. But again, we focus on the wrong things. What bottle of wine should we send? We totally focus on the wrong things. Again. Because of the bar being so low with the story that I told you when you leave your house on this trip, be nice. Let's start there. You don't have to do anything extra. Be nice. Spend time and energy and money training your people on emotional intelligence, self-awareness, empathy. If I show up and my credit card and my license are in my hand and I'm spelling my four-letter last name to you, Clearly, I don't want to hear about your spa, right? But you have to be emotionally intelligent enough and give your employees enough flexibility within a framework to say, you know what? I don't need to repeat the spiel to every guest. because I don't care about being shopped by the mystery shopper on the transaction, I'd rather ace the emotional based. Because if you read me enough and you give me what I want, which is don't talk to me, don't tell me where the elevator is, I could hear it, hand me my key, life is good. Someone else shows up a minute after me, they're fumbling through their bag, they're bitching about their flight, they're talking about the Uber, clearly that's someone who wants to be talked to. It's much easier said than done. I am not here, and by the way, And it's interesting dilemma because not everything I tell you I ace, like this is my nirvana. I suck at it too in my hotels and a lot of them. This is what we want to accomplish. I'm not saying if you go to my hotel, it's perfect. It's not, it's hard work. But I feel like as an industry, again, we are not focusing on the things that matter because we're distracted, focusing on the things that don't matter. And there's this idea of don't give me what you think I want. Give me what I actually want. Take the time to learn about me and give me what I want. So when you talk about, when you talk about collecting information, the Peninsula and Beverly Hills did a survey and asked all their guests, they said, and they have a lot of loyal guests. Why do you keep coming here? I want to say something like 70% of the people they serve it said we come here because we can come in whenever we want. No check-in time and no check-out time. Think about that. If you could take all your energy from the bottles of wine and the amenities and turn down certain, no one said any of those things are why they come back. They said that's the reason they come back. So act on the things you know to be true. You could learn a lot from your guests. And by the way, in today's technology world, if I want to, I could literally find out how many times you flushed the toilet, how long were your lights on, did you wash your hands after you flushed the toilet or not, how long your shower was. We can collect as much information as we want because it's easy and inexpensive. But what are we doing with it? Back to my comment about why doesn't Marriott have a data scientist department with five PhDs from MIT dissecting their 150 million database and saying, let's really focus on giving them what they want. And let's marry what we know about them with what they tell us about themselves out there in the world. And again, forget AI, whatever the term is, it doesn't matter. Machine learning, the older term, I suppose. You could find out a lot about people and merge the data to create an ideal, profile on someone to give them what they want. Now, in due course, maybe technology will start moving that way. There's this idea of when I walk down the hallway with my phone, the hallway should know I'm walking down it, and the art should change to my taste, and the scent should be my taste, and when I walk into the room, the TV should be on the channel I normally like. That will come, but as an industry, as you know, it's gonna take us, it'll be like 20 years old, that technology, before we adopt it, because we're late adopters. I feel today, without tech, use technology, to create those magical moments. That person who found out about me on TEDx or whatever did it online. He looked me up. He's like, oh, that's that guy. Great. So you don't have to do it for every guest and you don't have to do that much. The bar is really low.

Josiah: I appreciate you sharing that because the bar is low so you can get started now. You're talking about things that are more cultural, more mindset focused, more this is how we want to welcome people. But it is interesting to think, especially for some of our listeners who maybe are working out of Marriott, to think what might be possible. And I think you're talking about machine learning or big data. It's interesting to me because we're sharing a lot on social media and stuff. That's sort of interesting. You do a lot with that. But I think if you could get into predictive analytics to understand people that do X, Y, and Z also might like this, this, and this. And that's where Amazon seems to know things before we even know that we need them. And I feel like, I mean, this is kind of the, it feels like such a big opportunity. So it's kind of blowing my mind where Marriott and others.

Bashar: By the way, think about it. If I'm checking in at a Marriott and you put technology to work, you should know that my flight was delayed. So when I walk in the door, you should say, Hey, Mr. Wally, we know your flight was delayed. Did you get a chance to have anything to eat? Blown away. I am a customer for, by the way, I'm going to talk sacrilege now. There is no loyalty programs. There's bribery programs. You come stay at my hotel, I give you points. The owner of that hotel is paying for the points. That's not loyalty. And if I stop giving you points, will you still come? I don't know. Is that loyalty? You talk about true loyalty, that's how you get loyalty. So the point is, to your earlier comment, we say so much about ourselves and no one does anything with it. Now, some brands are brilliant and they catch it, right? And they know what to do with it. Not hotel brands. And I often say now, I never look at other hotels for inspiration. I look at retail. And the reason why I talk about retail is a couple of things. Retail was a diverge of obscurity, of Going away not that long ago. Not that long ago and they figured out we've got a change So necessity right is the mother of all infestions like we're going to go extinct Nike here in our hometown in Portland. They say listen come to the store. We know you're not gonna buy anything We don't want you to buy anything. We want to create loyalty with our brand So we're giving you these experiential things in store to make you fall further in love with our brand go buy it online It doesn't matter right so hotels have so much opportunities to do so much of that to create loyalty, yet we feel miserably at it because we keep doing the same things we've done before. And we're not changing our ways because we think it's worked for a hundred years, but the world has changed in the last 10 years more than it has in a thousand years. So we've got to adapt and adopt and be early adopters and not be the dinosaurs left behind with the legacy reservation systems and figure out how to make sure we know our customer and we know what they want and give them what they want.

Josiah: You've referenced your TED talk a few times and it's been seen by so many people. It's crazy. I was just pulling it up again. It's just crazy to see that just being this evergreen thing. And the message is so simple. It's so simple, but it seems like it still resonates with people. So it feels like there is something about that simplicity that you know, people keep coming back to it. They keep watching.

Bashar: Our industry is so simple. I do this when I do the public speaking. I say, OK, people, I'm going to save you half a million bucks in a Cornell undergrad degree. I'm going to give it to you right now. There's a saying that goes, I grew up in the Middle East, there's a saying that goes, when a stranger shows up at your door, feed him for three days before you ask him where he is, where he's from, where he's going to, because by then he'll either have the strength to answer or you'll be such good friends it won't matter. If you understand that concept, Forget school, you don't need school. Literally, that is the concept. Our business is so simple. I need to give you, by the way, a clean bed and a good shower and good Wi-Fi and a comfortable mattress, table stakes. That gets you in the game. What wins you the game is that thing. Again, hand on heart, make someone feel special. The other thing I've trademarked, by the way, in the industry is longing for belonging. We humans, we are tribal animals. We have to be part of something bigger than we are to survive. Like you couldn't run off in the forest back in the day and be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger on your own. You needed your community. And when I come to a strange town, foreign town, I want to feel like I belong. We all talk about hotels, your home away from home, yet we feel so miserably at it. Make me feel comfortable and safe and secure. By the way, we talk a lot about Hotels should be one of the safest places you could stay, right? You should feel like you're safe and secure. Yet, you're watching these TikTok things about how to double lock the door and stuff the thing in the, stuff the peephole and, and, and, and. I can't tell you how many out of, again, 249 hotels in Manhattan I've gone to that anyone can take the elevator and walk up to a guest floor. Like that is table stake, yet we fail at that.

Josiah: Absolutely. But look.

Bashar: We need to compete, right? The world has so many options now, paradox of choice. But we feel that the way we need to compete is throwing things at it. And the more things we throw at it, the more uneconomically sound it becomes, and the more the owners are growing tired of losing more money and losing more money and losing more money. Because I think, again, we have focused on the wrong things, not invested in our employees. Invested, by the way, in our diversity, back to diversity for a minute, to show little African-American kid who's a bellman that he has an opportunity to become a general manager or an owner or a VP. And right now they don't see people that look like them at those places. It is upon us to show them because then we have their loyalty. Because we keep talking about customer loyalty. Well, that's important. But the more important part is employee, teammate loyalty. Because without them being there with you, again, revolving door and you'll just keep going and again and again through this vicious cycle. So Marriott said it well for all my trash talk in Marriott, take care of your employees who will take care of your customers who will take care of you. Like that, again, that has never gotten out of style. Marriott invented this business, and that has been their adage, and it hasn't changed.

Josiah: So you don't need to maybe keep inventing new things. Let's go back to the basics. Does that create long-term opportunity for people thinking about working in hospitality, people working in hospitality? considering staying in this business. I'm curious, I've had a number of conversations recently where people are saying is AI a net job detractor or creator? In the hospitality business, it feels like there's something durable here regardless of what happens.

Bashar: I mean, I don't know. Well, until such time that we can lie in bed and put a pair of VR goggles on and not have to travel, we are traveling. So the industry isn't going anywhere. The question of technology, through the pandemic, we, out of necessity, we owners, had to survive. And to survive, we leaned into the technology thing, which at first was the touchless. And then it became interesting, like, oh, we can cut out so many people. And the airlines were magical at it. Remember, you walk up to the counter, there'll be 30 agents at the counter. Now there's two, because everything happens on the kiosk or the app. But the airlines have the advantage of having you captive on the plane to show you their service, right? To engage with you and create loyalty. If I skip the human on the way in and the way out in a hotel, I have no opportunity to engage with you. Now I've become this dark black corporate hole. You come for a commodity, you get your bed and your shower that you need, the lowest level physiological need on Maslow's hierarchy of need, and you leave. So what I've said is, Use technology to remove friction, right? Because then what's left is the time for me to engage with you and talk to you as a human. Don't ask me to sign three times, an initial seven times, and don't ask me for my credit card, and don't ask me to change my keyboard to numerical when I'm on the zip code field. Cut all that shit out so that when I come, you could say to me, hey, welcome. We got you. What are you in town for? Let me tell you about this amazing thought place that I love that I go to. Forget the Michelin star stuff. Everybody ever knows about that stuff. Let me tell you about the secrets. And no matter how many websites tell you about those, you still want to hear from a person because humans are reliable. It's not ad sponsored as you might think of it on a website or an app. So I feel like there's magic in removing the friction and creating the opportunity to further engage in the beautiful art of conversation. If I go to Starbucks and find a machine and put my card in it and press a button to get a latte, I might as well do it at home. Why am I going to Starbucks? Because there's this energy around having other humans. You know, there's this beautiful quote now about after the pandemic, we all want to be together alone. And it's such a great capture of what we humans want. What you're talking about at this hotel isn't because you want to pick someone up or have a conversation with anyone. You just want to feel that you are with your tribe. You're safe. When the saber-toothed tiger shows up, there's someone else besides you to help defend the village. And that's all. It's a very basic physiological need that we have. It's in our DNA. It's innate to us. We can't help it.