An accommodation isn't finished being designed when it opens

Before opening an accommodation business, you can try to foresee almost everything.

You design the product, define processes, choose the technology, set up distribution, run the numbers, decide what the experience will be like and try to anticipate what the guest will need.

It has to be done. The better prepared you are for opening, the better.

But then you open the door.

And the property starts teaching you things.

You discover how guests really use the spaces. What they understand and what they don't. What they keep asking. What they value more than you expected and what they barely notice. Which process works perfectly on paper but makes day-to-day life harder. Which element needs too much maintenance. Which product decisions you got right and which you'll have to revisit.

Because designing how an accommodation should work is one thing, and watching it work every single day is another.

Opening doesn't finish the project. It starts the part where reality helps us improve it.

The guest finishes explaining the product

We can spend months thinking about how someone will use a room.

Where they'll leave their suitcase. What they'll need when they walk in. How they'll use the kitchen. Where they'll sit. What information they'll need. What they'll do when they get up in the morning.

And even so, when the first guests arrive, behaviours appear that we hadn't foreseen.

Not necessarily because the product is badly designed. Simply because people don't always use spaces the way we imagine.

Sometimes something we considered secondary turns out to be very important. Or something we spent a huge amount of time on barely affects their experience.

That's why managing also means observing.

The questions that keep coming up. The things nobody uses. The requests that start to appear. The comments. The problems the team runs into. Even the way people move or use certain things.

All of that holds information about the product.

And some improvements start right there.

Small frictions stop being small when they happen every day

Some problems seem insignificant when you see them once.

A process that forces three unnecessary steps. A door that always raises the same doubt. An integration that fails every now and then. Something that makes cleaning harder. A piece of information the guest can't find. A manual task that takes five minutes longer than it should.

Five minutes doesn't sound like much.

Until it happens several times a day, all year round.

A lot of management is about spotting those small frictions and deciding which ones are worth removing.

Because when something repeats, it ends up turning into time, cost, mistakes, work for the team or annoyance for the guest.

And improving a business often doesn't require a big decision.

It requires paying enough attention to the small things.

You also have to be willing to change something you liked

This may be one of the hardest parts.

When you've helped create a product, it's easy to grow attached to certain decisions.

You thought them through, you chose them for a reason and you were probably convinced of them when you opened.

But then reality arrives.

Perhaps a space isn't used the way you expected. A process turns out to be too complicated. A service is barely valued. An aesthetic solution works worse than planned in day-to-day use.

And then you have to be willing to change it.

Not because the original decision was necessarily wrong. It was made with the information available at the time.

Now we have new information.

Managing also means letting reality correct some of our own ideas.

But not everything has to be the most efficient

The opposite happens too.

There are things we know we could simplify and choose to keep. A material that needs a little more care. A special object. A particular way of welcoming the guest. A detail that means more work. Something that may never show up in a report explaining how much extra revenue it generates.

We keep it because it's part of the product we want to offer.

Because, above all, hospitality is about creating places where people want to be.

Efficiency matters. Costs matter. Processes matter. But they shouldn't make us lose sight of what everything else is there for.

That's why there are decisions we don't judge solely on how much time they save or how much they cost. What they bring to the experience, to the identity of the property and to the way we want to do things matters too.

The key is for it to be a conscious decision.

Knowing where we need to be efficient and which things are worth protecting even if they demand a bit more.

Managing is also designing

When an accommodation opens, the project doesn't end.

What changes is the information we use to make decisions.

Before opening, we work with studies, experience, data, scenarios, budgets and a lot of assumptions.

Afterwards we have something that didn't exist before: reality.

We have guests using the product. A team working every day. Processes that work —or don't—. Real costs. Problems that keep recurring. Things that work better than expected. And opportunities we hadn't seen.

So it's time to observe, measure, listen, correct and test again.

Some improvements will be big.

Many will be tiny.

But together they mean the property we're managing a year after opening is probably better than the one we imagined before we did.

Opening doesn't finish the project. It starts the part where reality helps us improve it.

Perhaps that's why we like to think an accommodation is never completely finished.

Not because it has to keep changing all the time.

But because managing also means continuing to learn how to do it better.