Hotel messaging hell
A descent into the seven circles of push messaging
I just got back from a weekend walking a chunk of the south downs way with some friends. Because I can't switch my service antenna off, and because the hotel we stayed in went large in a few ways, I feel compelled to write about it.
The night before we drove to Hampshire, I got I think my third identical SMS in twenty-four hours. “Time is running out” it shrieked in asterisks. But time was, in fact, not running out. 5 of us were going for one night, had paid in advance, and check-in was still twenty-six hours away. But the messages kept coming, each one warning that I needed to check in online or risk the consequences. The nature of the consequences were ominously never specified.
Then came the escalation email. “Please note that ALL Guests are required to have a valid Government issued ID. Failure to present valid photo ID will result in denied entry to the hotel.” Even more asterisks on either side of "Important Information" this time.
We arrived, obediently with our drivers licenses and passports in hand, and of course nobody asked for them. To be honest we got a distinct sense that reception wasn't even expecting us.
So an angry, persistent and urgent run up of messages, leading to a deflated and fundamentally empty arrival. What the hell was going on?
Messaging hell
As is the way with trips away with men, silly things like this become sustained topics of hilarity. Every stupid inbound message leading to plenty of shits and giggles.
But since I got back I took a more considered view, because this is something i’ve seen everywhere, not just hotels. Restaurants confirming a 7pm booking will now text me twice to remind me of their cancellation policy. The dentist sends me a pre-appointment questionnaire that requires me to attest, under what feels suspiciously like oath, that I have not recently travelled to a list of countries.
None of this used to exist. Or, to be more honest, some of it existed, in narrow pockets, for properly risky things. It was not the default tone of pre-arrival communication for a golf hotel in Hampshire.
The genre has a recognisable shape now. ALL in capitals. Failure to comply will result in xxx. Important Information flagged with double asterisks. The whole vibe reads like someone has copy-pasted from a tenancy agreement and forgotten to adjust the tone.
What I think happened (and where I might be wrong)
Four things, I think, and they've layered on top of each other rather than replaced one another.
The first is COVID residue. We forget how strange those two years were as a service-design exercise - more a service reaction. Every interaction became a compliance interaction. Stand six feet apart! Wear a mask! Sign in with this QR code or die! Provide your contact details for trace and trace or die! The pubs and restaurants and hotels that survived did so partly by becoming very, very good at telling customers what the rules were before they arrived. That muscle hasn't atrophied. The stickers are gone from the floors (well mostly; I still see ghostly outlines occasionally on the floors of newsagents and shops), but the pre-arrival warning email has stayed.
The second is the intermediaries. I booked this hotel through Booking.com. When you book through a platform like that, the hotel doesn't actually have your email address. Instead they have an alias, which the platform often actively blocks the hotel from emailing freely. I went down a small rabbit hole reading hotel-industry forums where operators complain bitterly about messaging restrictions, the alias addresses that don't deliver, the workarounds involving asking guests to send their real email via the platform's own messaging interface. The platforms have inserted themselves between the hotel and the guest. The hotel responds by front-loading every possible piece of information into the messages they can send, which arrive through the platform's channels, which feel and read like system notifications rather than human communications.
The third is that all the channels are broken. Email is the obvious one: half my friends declared inbox bankruptcy years ago, my mum check it once a week if I'm lucky, and under-thirties treat it the way I treat fax. So organisations spam and shout, because the only way to be confident a message has landed is to send it three times across three channels with the word URGENT on it. Which trains everyone to ignore the next one. Which makes the channel more degraded. You can see the loop.
Then there's WhatsApp, which is what hotels have started reaching for instead. I booked an Airbnb in Bath earlier this year and got a WhatsApp message, supposedly from the host, asking me to send a photo of my passport for "verification". It was a scam. Somebody had pulled my booking details from somewhere (probably the host's own contact list, harvested in one of the routine breaches that now barely qualify as news) and was fishing for documents they could use to apply for credit in my name. The real host messaged me through the Airbnb app a day later, completely unaware that her guest had been impersonated. I now ignore WhatsApp messages from anyone I haven't met in person, which is presumably the opposite of what Airbnb hosts and hotels want.
All this means - and this is the bit that I think is genuinely structural - the rational customer response to all of this is to ignore everything until you're standing at the desk. Which is exactly what hard-pressed, understaffed hospitality venues like Meon Valley are trying to avoid. They're sending the messages precisely because they want to get the friction out of the way before you arrive, so the receptionist has thirty seconds rather than ten minutes per guest. Their entire pre-arrival comms strategy is designed to compensate for the fact that they don't have enough staff at the desk to handle anything else - because the cost of running a hotel has (guess what) increased massively over the last 24 months. But it doesn't work, because all the channels are broken, so we ignore the messages, so we arrive with everything still to be done, so the receptionist gets less time per guest, not more. Everyone loses.
There’s also a fourth issue: reviews. I got a feedback request via Booking.com before I'd checked in. The hotel hadn't seen me yet and yet someomne was already asking how I was finding things. This is not stupidity. It's the review economy doing what the review economy does. I was at a conference last week and heard Tripadvisor explain how travel reviews power the economy. Well, they would say that. Apparently, nine in ten travellers read reviews before booking, according to TrustYou, who also would say that. A bad rating on Booking.com can move the bookings dial visibly. Hotels have, rationally, started treating the post-stay review as the actual product they're delivering. The night in the bed is just the bit in the middle. And THAT was very much how it all felt.
What all this does to you
Here is the actual point of this post.
The cumulative effect of all of this, sitting on the receiving end, is that you arrive at the hotel already mildly annoyed. Not because anything bad has happened or because the hotel is run by wicked people, but because the whole system inadvertently leaves you feeling managed. You've been processed through a sequence of touch points - confirmation, reminder, online check-in, ID warning, cashless payment notice, pre-arrival survey - none of which made you feel welcome. They inadvertantly made you feel like a record in a database that the hotel was nervously trying to make sure was complete.
And what's striking is how this seeps through in the overall vibe and tone of it. The architecture is being actively designed (by platforms, by PMS vendors, by review-management software) but the voice isn't. Yet voice is everything in hospitality. I strongly suspect nobody at the hotel sat down and wrote those messages thinking about what a guest might feel reading them. Certainly it doesn’t feel like anyone read them all end to end. Instead they came out of a template, configured by someone whose job is to make sure the property doesn't get downrated. The voice is the residue of the system, not the choice of the hotel.
Fixing and healing
Service used to be the thing that closed the gap between the printed policy and the human in front of you. It was the receptionist who looked at the sweaty group of middle aged men standing there tired after a long day walking in 32 degree heat, and decided they could be trusted and the photo ID rule could be waved. It was the moment of judgment that meant the institution didn't feel like an institution.
That moment just doesn't happen as much any more. Not because the staff are bad - they aren’t - but because the architecture doesn't support those moments anymore. The judgment has been pre-loaded into the comms sequence, and the sequence runs on whether you've ticked the right boxes, not on what you look like when you arrive.
Anyway - it was all fine in the end. Hotel served its purpose. Whole trip was lots of fun. The online comms experience, less so.