The soloist
One person's talent is covering a gap in the design. On the days they are not there, the guest meets a different property.
Do your scores change depending on who is on shift?
Most luxury hotels and restaurants do not fail on concept or on talent. They lose coherence somewhere between the vision and the execution.
That loss is paid for every day: in comps and service recovery, in turnover, in a rate that becomes harder to defend, and in guests who do not come back.
Repeated long enough, it stops being visible from inside. And it almost never appears in a report.
What I Do
An experience is not a list of services. It is a sequence, and the guest reads it as one continuous thing: how they are met, how a request travels between departments, what happens when something goes wrong, how they are sent off.
Experience architecture is designing that sequence on purpose, instead of letting it assemble itself. It brings the concept, the space, the timing and the senses together, so that what is physical, what people do and what the guest feels all say the same thing.
Well run departments do not add up to one experience unless the seams between them are designed too. And it is built for the team as much as for the guest: a team given a coherent sequence knows what to do when the script runs out.
When that architecture is missing, it fails in recognisable ways.
Situations worth recognising
Some patterns I have seen repeat across very different projects. Do you recognise any of them?
Each of these is paid twice: once in what it costs, and again in what it quietly prevents.
The product that does not land
Everything is right and none of it registers. Either the expectation was built higher than the stay could meet, or the value is real and nothing helps the guest see it. The property does not shine the way its product deserves, and no single department is doing anything wrong.
Do the reviews describe the property you think you run?
The turnover nobody explains
People leave a property that works on paper. When what the team is asked for and what it is given do not match, the friction lands on them every day, and the ones who care most are the first to go.
Are the people leaving the ones you most wanted to keep?
The weak ending
Investment goes to the arrival and the peaks. When the warmth ends with the payment, the guest learns it was part of the price, and a stay that felt personal is remembered as something they bought.
Does your guest leave with a bill, or with an invitation to return?
The building the service inherits
The space is designed and the concept is written before the operation arrives, and the operation is asked to make both work. Distances, sightlines and handovers were decided before anyone asked how the service would move through them. The team then spends years compensating for a plan.
Has anyone walked your floor plan with a tray in hand?
The permanent soft opening
A soft opening is where real conditions meet the plan, and the adjustments that follow are the work, not a sign of failure. The problem is the property where they never end, and the opening quietly becomes a permanent state.
Six months in, has the operation settled, or is it still being adjusted?
The same symptom can have several causes. A good solution aimed at the wrong one changes nothing.
Do you recognise one of these in your project, or is yours none of them? If you have not opened yet, most of them can be designed out before opening day.
Tell me about yoursTwo Ways In
Before you open
The concept translated into a guest journey: the sequences, the handovers between departments, and the culture that has to carry them, designed before opening day.
So what opens is the concept itself, not an approximation of it.
When it already runs
The experience read from the guest's chair, then traced back through the operation that produces it.
To find where intention and delivery come apart, and what is causing it.
How It Starts
There is no price list here and nothing ready to buy. Each engagement is shaped for the place it belongs to, which is why it begins with a conversation and not a proposal.
- A conversation.About symptoms, not solutions. Confidential, and with nothing owed on either side. The point is to find out whether I can help with what you are seeing, and whether working together makes sense at all.
- A visit.Scoped and agreed beforehand. If you are open, I watch the real operation, usually unannounced, as a guest, so nobody performs for a visitor. If you are not open yet, I study the concept, the plans and the team in detail.
- A report, read together.With three legitimate options: leave it, knowing what that costs; fix it internally; or fix it together.
If we go on, I design the sequence that removes the cause. The aim is not a perfect operation, there is no such thing, but a coherent one: fewer avoidable mistakes, and the unavoidable ones met the same way by everyone. The team makes it theirs, so it works without me in the room.
Before We Talk
A few questions I am often asked, so neither of us loses time.
Who are you?
Rubén Menéndez González. I work on my own and take few projects at a time, which is the only way this work is done properly. Esmero Advisory is the company I work through. LinkedIn
Who have you worked with?
More than a decade in luxury hotels, resorts and Michelin-starred restaurants, first in the kitchen, then in F&B and guest experience. That is where I learned to read an operation from the inside, and it is why I work from the inside out, not the other way round. My consulting clients are not named here, for the same reason yours would not be. On a call, I am glad to walk you through situations comparable to yours.
Why should I trust you?
You should not, yet. Trust is earned, not inherited. That is what the first call is for: I listen to your case, I tell you whether I know how to help, I explain how I work, and I answer whatever you want to ask. If you are not convinced at the end of it, you have spent thirty minutes and you leave with more clarity than you had.
What do your services cost?
My work is to bring coherence, so it would be incoherent to put a price on something I have not designed yet. The process is always the same. The first call is free. After it, I study your case and send you the cost of the visit. Once the visit is done, I give you the full proposal, and what you paid for the visit is deducted from the total if we go ahead. I do not quote the whole engagement before the visit, for the same reason a diagnosis needs an examination first. You will know every figure before it applies, and it only changes if the scope does, by agreement. Depending on the type of engagement, part of the fee can be tied to results. That does not suit every kind of work, so we decide it case by case.
What do you guarantee?
Not a number. Anyone promising you a score or a percentage is guessing, because the result depends on decisions that are yours and on a team that is not mine. What I guarantee is that the diagnosis is built for your property and nobody else's, and that the scope is agreed with you before anything starts. No checklist, and no solution lifted from another property.
Do you work alone?
On my own, yes, which is why I take few projects. In practice I work inside your team rather than beside it, and when something needs a specialist outside my own ground I bring in people from my network, as they sometimes bring in me. What does not happen is somebody arriving in my place: I design and supervise the work myself.
What kind of work do you take on?
Hotels, resorts and restaurants, open or about to open. The common factor is not the format, it is that the experience is meant to justify its price. Occasionally I also take smaller engagements: training, mystery guest visits, coaching, or reading a concept or an investment before it starts, to find the incoherences while they are still cheap to fix. If that is your case, let us talk and I will tell you honestly whether I can help.
If you have reached this page, someone recommended me or you were curious. Either way, there are two ways from here. You can close the page, and nothing is needed from you. Or we can talk. Whatever follows stays between us, from the first conversation to the last report.
Rubén Menéndez González
Or write to info@esmero.net