Beyond Five Stars : What Truly Defines Great Hospitality?

Expert Views with Rob Rijnders | Hospitality Executive and Consultant

After 45 years in hospitality, Rob Rijnders has reached a clear conclusion: great service and genuine hospitality are not the same thing.

Service can be organised, measured and written into procedures. Hospitality is more personal. It depends on recruiting people who genuinely enjoy helping others, training them properly and creating a culture in which they are trusted to care.

Here, Rob shares his views on what makes a hotel unforgettable, why leadership matters more than slogans, where technology belongs and how Pattaya can build a stronger international identity without pretending to be something it is not.

Q U E S T I O N 1

After 45 years of welcoming guests, what separates a good hotel experience from a truly unforgettable one?

After 45 years of welcoming guests with a Dutch/Thai smile, I can tell you this: the difference between good and unforgettable is rarely the room, the breakfast or even the price. Those are the expected basics.

The unforgettable experience comes from how the hotel makes guests feel, especially through small moments that make them think: the hotel noticed me, cared about me and quietly made me feel special during every contact with the team. 

Lasting impressions are created through a combination of hospitality values. 

Recognition: "They remember me." It may be my name, room preference, favourite drink, pillow preference, children's names, dietary preference or simply something I mentioned yesterday. 

Anticipation, not just reaction. Good staff notice what a guest needs before being asked. The extra towel is already there. The coffee is prepared the way I like it. A taxi is arranged before I ask. 

Genuine human warmth: "They actually care." This means more than trained smiles. It is eye contact, a sincere "Welcome back, Mr. Cees," or a staff member noticing that a guest looks tired and asking: "Can I help you with anything?" 

A moment of surprise: "Wow, I didn't expect that." It does not have to be expensive. It might be a handwritten note, a favourite snack, a birthday acknowledgement or a staff member remembering something from a previous visit. 

Effortless recovery: "The team made a problem disappear." Mistakes happen in every hotel. Unforgettable hotels do not necessarily make fewer mistakes. They recover exceptionally well. Guests remember the emotion of that recovery much longer than the original mistake.

A local touch: "I couldn't have experienced this anywhere else." A hotel should give guests a taste of Thailand through its food, culture, people, design, stories, recommendations and perhaps some genuine local connections. And I don't only mean Walking Street "connections"!

Q U E S T I O N 2

Is genuine hospitality something people are born with, or can it be taught?

Personality determines the starting point. Recruiting applicants who have what I would call Hospitality DNA is essential. These candidates instinctively notice when someone needs help. They enjoy making others feel comfortable, remember personal details, read body language, show genuine curiosity and take pride in helping.

These people can become exceptional hoteliers very quickly. Hospitality behaviours can indeed be taught.

You cannot teach someone to feel something on command, but you can teach people to behave in ways that create genuine connections. Training develops those skills. Company culture determines whether genuine hospitality becomes normal behaviour.

Culture is the multiplier, and this is where I think many hotel companies get it wrong.

You cannot continually tell employees, "We want you to care about our guests," while simultaneously measuring them primarily on speed, labour costs, upselling, productivity, compliance with standard operating procedures, complaints, revenue per available room and guest-comment scores.

Employees quickly understand what the organisation really values.

Culture is what happens when nobody is watching. If helping a guest outside your job description is appreciated, people will do more of it. If employees are punished for taking their own initiative, they will stop.

Leadership determines whether genuine hospitality survives.

Q U E S T I O N 3

What role does leadership play in creating a genuine hospitality culture?

Leadership is the real driving force. I would put leadership above culture because leadership creates culture.

A general manager who genuinely treats employees with respect creates employees who are much more likely to treat guests with respect.

A manager who knows employees' names, asks about their families, listens to their problems and recognises good work is demonstrating hospitality internally. Employees copy what leaders do, not what they put on the wall.

This creates an extremely important principle: you cannot consistently deliver external hospitality when you do not practise internal hospitality.

Employee experience -> Employee behaviour -> Guest experience -> Guest loyalty.

That is the chain.

The biggest mistake is confusing service with hospitality. Service can be standardised through SOPs. But you cannot write an SOP that says: "Care genuinely about the person standing in front of you."

You can, however, create an environment where caring for guests becomes normal behaviour.

When I trained hotel leadership teams, I used my personal hospitality formula:

Hospitality = Character x Training x Culture x Leadership

I deliberately use multiplication rather than addition. If one element approaches zero, the whole guest experience suffers.

Great personality combined with a bad culture creates a frustrated employee. Great training with bad leadership produces robotic service. A great culture with poor training creates good intentions but inconsistent delivery. Great leadership with the wrong people can achieve only limited results.

When all four elements work together, the result is genuine hospitality:

Right people + right behaviours + right culture + right leadership

Perhaps the most important recruitment question is not: "Can this person deliver five-star service?"

It should be: "Do they enjoy making other people feel good?"

Skills can be trained much more easily than attitude.

Q U E S T I O N 4

As hotels adopt more technology and artificial intelligence, which parts of hospitality should always remain human?

Let technology remove the friction. Let people create the emotion.

A guest does not necessarily want a human to perform every transaction. They want a human when it matters.

The first emotional connection in a hotel should remain human. A guest arriving after a long journey does not just need a key. They need to feel recognised and cared for.

Empathy must also remain human. Artificial intelligence can recognise spoken words such as "I'm exhausted" or "I'm disappointed." But a human being can sense the emotion behind those words and respond more appropriately.

Reading the guest is enormously important. Body language, tone, hesitation, eye contact, discomfort and excitement can communicate things the guest never actually says.

It may be a child who looks tired, an elderly guest struggling with his luggage or someone who has had a terrible journey. These are opportunities for human generosity, not automation.

Service recovery is another area where people remain essential. Technology can identify a complaint and direct it to the correct department. But when something has gone wrong, the guest often wants someone who genuinely cares that it happened to them. That requires human ownership.

Technology can also enable personal recognition, but a human should deliver it.

"Welcome back, Mr. Cuypers. How was your trip?" is fundamentally different from: "Welcome back. Your preferences have been retrieved from our CRM."

Birthdays, anniversaries, difficult journeys, family holidays and farewells are the moments guests may remember years later. They should feel human, spontaneous and authentic, not algorithmically generated.

Q U E S T I O N 5

Looking towards 2030, how should Pattaya position itself as an international destination?

If I were advising TAT or THA, I would not attempt to position Pattaya as "the family-friendly resort." It sounds too defensive.

I would aim for:

PATTAYA - THAILAND'S 24-HOUR COASTAL CITY

Beach by day. Culture at sunset. Entertainment at night. Wellness, sport, food and great experiences all year.

That is much more authentic.

Pattaya has something many Thai destinations do not have. It does not need to invent a nightlife economy because it already has one. It does not need to invent restaurants because it has thousands. It does not need to invent hotels because it has enormous capacity.

It does not need to invent entertainment because it has decades of experience. It does not need to invent internationalisation because it may be one of Thailand's most international cities.

The challenge is curating and repositioning what already exists.

Pattaya has a five-star tourism product with a three-star international reputation.

That gap is the opportunity.

TAT's national strategy is already moving towards quality over volume, thematic tourism, sustainability, wellness, meaningful experiences and market diversification.

Pattaya should become the flagship case study for implementing that strategy at destination level.

Not by pretending Pattaya isn't Pattaya, but by finally telling the whole Pattaya story.

Expert Views is a Town & Country Property editorial series featuring first-hand perspectives from people who help shape Pattaya and Thailand.
Approved by Rob Rijnders for publication.