Service Hotel is Liturgy

The field of robotics evolves much faster than some think. It has been replacing operators in automotive assembly lines for decades. It also works in hospitals, and not only in menial tasks; Da Vinci even performs heart operations. They shoot photographs and video from the air, dust the crops, and in 2015, will deliver Amazon-branded packages.

In a world that is more technological and mechanized every day, robots already occupy a very important place in the new industrial revolution. They will also be the main characters of the upcoming service revolution, which will affect the tourist industry utterly and completely. It won’t be long before we see them as an essential part of the backoffice workforce in a hotel, a restaurant, or in any company within the tourist trade.

Will this mean the loss of thousands, or even millions, of jobs? Not necessarily, if the alternative to this gradual mechanization of services is the liturgy of hospitality. Various seminars dictated under the umbrella of Hotel 2020, which is the tourism as seen within the next six years, corroborate the necessity of this renovation in the hospitality trade in order to not be replaced by machines. Because a hotel is a matter of people. Because the behavior of a host is the superlative art of hospitality.

In the future, the only way to create value will demand great creativity, personal motivation and the introduction of new concepts in everyday work. The old ethos of service will be surpassed by a new, more exciting concept, a more humanistic concept: the concept of liturgy. A set of differential practices which will evoke unforgettable sensations and emotions in travelers.

The international chain The Peninsula, which has hotels in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok, Manila, Paris, Beverly Hills, Chicago and New York symbolizes this liturgical vision whose only, exclusive protagonists are the resources, never more aptly called human, of their various advertising actions.

In the movie which heads this page we discover how much sensibility, sense of rhythm, personal and spiritual levitation learned are required to properly represent the human condition of a job well done. Onto God what is of God, and onto the robots, the rods of the hospitality industry.