A hospitality sector veteran writes the book on delivering a standout experience
Cassie Davison admits she was a little young when she tagged along with her parents to a local pub, but what happened once they got there taught her everything about the value of creating a strong hospitality experience.
“What I loved about it wasn’t the fizzy pop in the packet of crisps. It was actually the adults around me suddenly coming alive and feeling relaxed,” said Davison, a former owner-operator of multiple pubs, cafés, fine-dining restaurants and festivals. “I instinctively knew that the pub really mattered.”
Davison has spent more than 30 years in the industry and has since founded Kith & Kin, a network of hospitality professionals who gather to share insight and ideas. More recently, she is the author of Stand-Out Hospitality: How to Have a Business You Love That Loves You Back, which offers five pillars that are core to delivering a great experience.
Shortly after the book’s launch, Davison talked with 360 Magazine from the U.K. and reflected on the book’s themes and the sector’s future outlook. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
From a customer experience standpoint, what stood out to me most was your notion that brands should “build belonging.” I wondered if you could kind of comment on why that’s such a core pillar.
People buy with emotion and then justify it with logic. And what we tend to do in business is bombard them with the logic first. That’s not why they’re going to come to you. They’re not going to come to you and keep coming back because you logic them into a good decision. They’ll come because it feels right to them, and they won’t even know that that’s what they’re doing. It’s creating spaces where they feel that they belong, because fundamentally, people are all craving that, particularly in a world that becomes more and more isolating through tech and AI, and the fact that we’re not in our offices so much anymore.
Your book also talks about the importance of creating genuine, memorable customer experiences. In some respects, there’s not always a ton of time to do that. In hospitality, people are trying to turn tables over, get people in and out. What’s your advice on how to make sure that they’re intentional about that?
I think there’s a tendency to try to over-engineer it. When people talk about creating experiences they, end up thinking, ‘Okay, so I need to put an event.’ But really, the venue is blank canvas for other people’s experiences. And so your role is not to tell people how they should experience your venue. It is to create a space for them to use in a way that is meaningful for them, It’s making sure that you have set high standards, that you are consistent, that there’s a care in that quality, that you are taking pride in everything that’s going on. You serving (beverages) in clean glasses and the toilets are clean and your staff are friendly. Those things matter not because they are themselves the experience, but it creates the space for people to have their own experience without distractions.
Your book is coming out just a few years after the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s your take on how that changed the hospitality sector?
What lockdown did was just accelerate trends that were happening anyway. People go out less. There’s much more competition in the hospitality scene, because our hospitality now is not just the next venue down the road, it’s also the supermarket and what’s on TV and even what kind of gaming is popular. We don’t know where customers are going to be. It used to be that Friday and Saturday were the busiest nights. Now you’re just as likely to be busy on a Monday afternoon because people have taken a long weekend, and they’re not going out in the evenings. They’re coming out at lunch instead. The hospitality industry hasn’t settled yet, customers behavior hasn’t settled yet.
I think what’s happening in the industry is almost going in two directions. You’re going to have some go in the direction of the kiosk, grab and go kind of stuff, and then you’re going to have the much more experiential places where drop everything at the door, you come in and you give yourself two, three or four hours sit with the people that you care about.
