Hyatt Hotels’ Mark Hoplamazian on a New Perspective on the Hospitality Industry at Skift Forum

Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Hyatt Hotels, spoke today at the Skift Global Forum.

After being appointed to the Board of Directors in November 2006, Hoplamazian was named President and CEO of Hyatt Hotels that December.

Hoplamazian’s talk “Reversing Your POV: A New Perspective on the Hospitality Industry,” explored the power of empathy and how that can be applied to the hospitality industry. Here are 5 things we learned:

• What if hotels treated guests like hosts? What if hotels checked into guests’ lives instead of guests checking into hotels?
• Seeing the world through others’ eyes is exactly the kind of reverse perspective that this industry needs. As we think about applying empathy in our business, we think about it as the essential capacity to bring humanity back into hospitality.
• By changing your point of view you can reimagine your relationship with your customers, your employees and with your community. We can create a world in which hotels are the guests in others’ lives, where employers are working for their employees as much as the other way around, and where the communities are becoming a part of who you are and what you stand for and how you do what you do.
• For anybody who understands what the meaning of empathy is, you know that impact can only come through action, because when you act on an empathetic insight or impulse, it is the purest form of humanness. It is something that you do to anticipate a need or alleviate a burden in some way, and you can do it in a way that only enhances the bottom line, and not just the financial bottom line but in the impact you can have on the peoples’ lives you touch every day.
• At Hyatt, we have an equation that we use, and it is one that we put together to remind ourselves to reverse perspective, practice empathy and combine it with passion, so it is a call to action. It goes, “Empathy + Action = Care,” and care is the essence of what we stand for.

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And thanks to all the sponsors that made Skift Global Forum 2015 possible: Adobe, Amadeus, American Express, Boxever, Big Bus Tours, CendyneOne, Cheapoair, Criteo, Gogo, HelloGbye, Hornblower Cruises, MasterCard, Mindtree, National Geographic, NewsCred, Sabre, SiteMinder, Travel Channel, TurkeyHome, Uber, Underline, Virtuoso, and Yahoo.