Hoteliers at luxury properties often say they know their guests better than anyone, and in many ways this is true. Guest history tools are used well, customer relationship management profiles are updated carefully and on-property teams pay close attention to repeat behavior and personal preferences. The systems capture the facts. The people capture the feelings.
It is the feelings, the emotional observations, the small details that make luxury hospitality meaningful. These tend to live in what I call the biological database, stored in the heads of the concierge, the reservations team, the general manager or the butler.
The issue is not that hotels do not know their guests. The issue is when they know them.
Most of this valuable insight emerges only after a guest has booked, and very often only once they have arrived. By then, the most influential stages of the guest journey have already passed.
Experience design does not start at check-in. It starts at discovery.
The forgotten funnel
Luxury hotels invest enormous time and energy in the "book" and "stay" phases simply because these are the moments they can see. A booking appears. A welcome drink is served. A guest is recognized and delighted. And while this excellence is essential, it often overshadows the two most decisive phases: "find" and "choose."
This is where travelers dream, research, compare, imagine and emotionally align. This is where relevance is built. This is where a hotel becomes visible — or disappears entirely. Yet hotels rarely see any data from these phases, which makes them easy to overlook. Without visibility, it is tempting to conclude that nothing much happens here. In reality, everything happens here.
And even the "grow" phase, the final part of the journey, is often reduced to a thank you email, a survey and a monthly newsletter. Functional, yes, but is it truly personalized? Does it feel like a continuation of a relationship? Does the guest sense that the staff genuinely remember them, or does it read like content sent to everyone? A hotel that excels during the stay can still fall silent the moment the journey ends.
The guests you know vs The guests you could have
One of the most persistent illusions in luxury hospitality is the belief that knowing current guests automatically means understanding future ones. But most profiling still relies on broad demographics and market segments. Age brackets. Nationalities. Repeaters. Honeymooners. Corporate FIT.
Useful, but not transformative.
What truly drives travel decisions today are motivations, values and emotions. A traveler choosing a secluded villa is not responding to a demographic label. They are seeking privacy, space, calm, balance or beauty. Another traveler may be driven by wellness depth, creative dining or a sense of cultural authenticity. These are the signals that shape the find and choose stages, yet they rarely appear in CRM fields or marketing content.
A hotel team can know exactly what a guest prefers at breakfast, yet have almost no understanding of what a future guest is looking for in the first place.
This disconnect decides who becomes visible in the early funnel and who remains invisible.
Google AI and the voice of the guest
A fascinating development, and at a fast pace, is how accurately Google’s AI-driven review summaries describe hotels. They do not merely list amenities. They reveal what guests talk about repeatedly and emotionally. One theme appears across almost every luxury property: the people.
Guests talk more about the warmth, personality, humor, charm and genuine care of your team than about any physical feature of the hotel. These human moments are described vividly in thousands of reviews, yet they almost never appear in early funnel storytelling. Hotels wait until arrival to show the magic of the team, even though guests already celebrate it publicly.
This gap matters. Google reports that more than 40% of travelers now use broad, conversational searches to plan their trips, seeking emotional alignment rather than simple facts. If the early funnel story does not reflect what guests value most, AI engines cannot match the hotel to the traveler’s intent.
In many cases, the guest describes the hotel better than the hotel describes itself.
If we stay inside the bottle, we only see the guests we already have. Once we step outside, we see the guests we could attract next.
You cannot read the label from inside the bottle
Luxury hotels spend so much time inside their own bottle, perfecting the stay experience, that they seldom step outside and look at themselves the way a traveler does. Inside the bottle, everything makes sense. Outside the bottle, things can look surprisingly different.
So let us uncork the bottle for a moment.
Do future guests understand who we are before we ever speak to them?
Do we tell the human story early enough?
Do we reflect the emotional themes guests talk about most?
Are we visible for the searches that matter?
Do our post stay communications feel like a relationship, or a routine?
Are we aligning our pricing and positioning to what guests actually compare us to, rather than to what STR tells us?
These questions matter because they define how a hotel performs in the find and choose stages, not just during the stay. And they decide whether the grow stage strengthens the bond or quietly erodes it.
The journey's true beginning and end
The hotels that will succeed in the next decade will be those that combine the structured information in their PMS and CRM with the emotional intelligence in their biological database, and then express this clearly in the early funnel. They will understand that their people are part of the product, that guests search with emotion, and that the post-stay phase is not a polite formality but a commercial opportunity to maintain relevance and affection.
And perhaps the best way to close is with the words of a general manager who joined one of our recent workshops. After stepping outside the bottle with us for a few hours, Óscar Bellido Esteban, hotel manager at Casa Almagro said, “Thank you for your inspiring insights and for teaching me to step outside the box and see things through our guests’ eyes. I truly appreciate how you remind us that creating a memorable experience begins long before they arrive.”
That is the heart of it.
The memorable experience does not start at check in.
It starts at discovery and continues long after departure.
And if you only know the guests you already have, you are already falling behind.
Philip Schaetz is founder and managing director of CUBE. Prior to establishing CUBE in 2018, Philip enjoyed a long career in revenue management, distribution expertise and sales and marketing strategy in senior global positions for some of the world’s largest hotel & resort brands.
This column is part of ISHC Global Insights, a partnership between CoStar News and the International Society of Hospitality Consultants.
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