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.
The guest does not experience departments. They experience one line.
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 team that learned the script
They were trained to follow a set of steps, and they follow them well. Then something happens that the steps do not cover, and they stop, or they invent. They learned the script, not the reason behind it, so they cannot rebuild it when the night goes off plan.
Do you train your team to follow the script, or to understand it?
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?
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 yoursThe same symptom can have several causes. A good solution aimed at the wrong one changes nothing.
Two Ways In
Before you open
We design the guest journey before the doors open: what happens at each step, how each department hands over to the next, and what the team has to understand to deliver it.
The point is simple. What opens should be the concept you planned, not the version your team improvises in the first month.
When it already runs
I go through the experience as a guest first, and then follow each part backwards into the operation that produced it.
That is how you find the exact point where what you intended and what the guest received stop matching, and what is causing it.
When This Is The Right Shape
Some problems are urgent. Others have a clear fix, but the work to get there takes months. And others only need someone for a short period, not for good.
Hiring a senior person from outside takes a search, a negotiation, a visa, a relocation, and most of a year before they read the property as well as you already do. Some groups cannot sponsor one at all. Others can, and do not need one permanently.
I come in already able to read it. I find the cause, I design the fix with your team, and I leave it running without me. If the structure itself is the cause, I will tell you, and the decision is yours.
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.Two to four days on site, agreed beforehand according to what we are looking for. 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.Within three days of leaving. 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.
I cannot tell you how long the correction takes before I know what is causing it. What I can tell you is that you have the diagnosis within a week of my arrival, and that once the decision is made we move. The visit is not a way of selling you a bigger project. If the answer is that you can fix it yourselves, I will say so.
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?
Fifteen years in hospitality: my own business first, then Michelin-starred restaurants, luxury hotels and resorts, moving from the kitchen into F&B and guest experience. That is where I learned to read an operation from the inside. Having stood in those roles is what lets me see the whole picture: not only what the guest receives, but everything that has to happen before it. 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.
You have spent most of your career in a kitchen.
Exactly. Almost everything that goes wrong between a property and its guest goes wrong between departments, not inside them. I see the floor with a cook's eyes and the kitchen with a floor's eyes. I know what a request costs on one side and how it looks from the other, which things are easy and which only appear to be, and I can say it to each department in its own language instead of in management's.
I have also been a guest my whole life, and for two years I did nothing else. That is the other half: knowing which moments actually make a stay memorable, and which only look like they should.
That is the ground I work from. Not a method I read.
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 or whether this is not my ground, 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 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: 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.
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 first call is free. After it, I send you the cost of the visit. Once the visit is done, you receive the full proposal, and what you paid for the visit is deducted if we go ahead. Every fee is built for the project it belongs to, and you will know each figure before it applies.
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 do guarantee: the diagnosis is built for your property and nobody else's, never a checklist and never a solution lifted from somewhere else. The scope is agreed with you before anything starts, so you always know what you are paying for and what you will get. And if the cause turns out to sit outside my ground, you still get the whole diagnosis: what is causing it, and what I would do about it, even when the person who should do it is not me. I am not going to invent a project in order to be the one who fixes it.
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.
Why do you not offer training?
I do, but inside a project, when the team needs reinforcement on something we have designed together. I also work with the people who carry the standard themselves, heads of department and senior staff, so that what we design stays alive without me. What I do not sell is training on its own.
Training teaches a team to execute what already exists. If what already exists is incoherent, training will not fix it. The team improves for a few weeks, the same problems come back, and the money is gone, because the cause was never the team.
Most of the time a property asks for training, training is not the problem.
So if you think yours needs it, let us talk first. If the design underneath is sound and training really is what is missing, I will tell you, and we will do it.
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
Fifteen years in hospitality: a three Michelin star Relais & Châteaux house, the full pre-opening of a luxury resort, and private service at the highest level. Current client work is confidential.
Or write to info@esmero.net