What a Guest's Name Can Teach You About Running a Hotel

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:47:04 GMT

People ask me all the time what changed the year we became Canada's #1 Hotel. They expect me to point to a renovation, or a marketing push, or some clever thing we did that the hotel down the street didn't think of.

The honest answer is less exciting than that, and also, I think, more important. Nothing changed. We just kept doing the thing we have always done, which is pay close attention to the person in front of us.

I know how that sounds. Every hotel on earth will tell you it cares about service. It goes on the website next to the stock photo of someone in a robe looking out at a view. So let me be specific about what I actually mean, because the specifics are the whole point.

The coffee thing

We have a guest who comes back every autumn. She takes her coffee a particular way, oat milk, no sugar, and she likes it waiting when she comes down rather than having to ask. The first year, someone on our team noticed and wrote it down. Now it is simply how her mornings go when she is with us. She has never once had to repeat herself.

That is not a system. We did not buy software to do that. Somebody paid attention, cared enough to remember, and told the rest of the team so the knowing would outlast any one person's shift. Multiply that across 30 rooms and you start to understand what we are actually selling. It is not the fireplace or the breakfast, lovely as those are. It is the feeling of being known.

You cannot really do that at scale. I want to be careful here, because I am not knocking the big hotels, they do things we could never do. But there is a reason the feeling of being recognized is rare, and the reason is math. When you have 800 rooms, the person at the desk cannot possibly know you. When you have 30, not knowing you starts to feel like a failure. The size is the strategy. We chose small on purpose, and we have never once regretted it, even on the nights when small means everyone pitches in to solve one guest's problem.

Why the ranking followed

Here is what I have come to believe after nearly a century of this hotel existing and quite a few years of me being the one worrying about it. The ranking is not the achievement. The ranking is the echo.

Guests do not leave a glowing review because you asked them to at checkout. They leave it because something during the stay caught them off guard, in a good way. A returning guest whose anniversary we remembered. A couple who mentioned, in passing, that they were celebrating something, and came back to the room to find we had noticed. Those moments are what people write about. And enough of those moments, written down by enough people over enough years, is what a ranking actually is.

So when we were named the best hotel in Canada, and then the seventh best in the world, the only Canadian hotel to land on that global list, I did not feel like we had won something. I felt like a lot of very small, very quiet acts of attention had finally added up in public.

What I would tell another hotelier

If you run a small property and you are watching the big brands spend money you do not have, I understand the anxiety. We felt it too. But I would gently push back on the idea that you are at a disadvantage. Your smallness is the one thing they cannot buy back.

The chains are spending enormous sums trying to make 800 rooms feel personal. You already have the thing they are chasing. The trap is thinking you need to act bigger to compete. You do not. You need to go the other direction, further into the personal, deeper into the details, harder into the parts of hospitality that only work when someone genuinely cares and is close enough to show it.

Remember the coffee. Write it down. Tell your team. Do that a few thousand times and the rankings tend to sort themselves out.

We are a 95-year-old Tudor mansion with 30 rooms in Victoria, and we are, for now, the seventh best hotel in the world. I still find that a little hard to say out loud. But I know exactly how we got here, and it fits on a notecard behind the front desk.

abigailshotel2

What a Guest's Name Can Teach You About Running a Hotel

The coffee thing

Why the ranking followed

What I would tell another hotelier