I was recently at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., with my teenage daughter watching singer Noah Kahan play the biggest show of his life. An estimated 56,00 people were in attendance: A sea of wrist lights bouncing in the dark like scattered magic dust. Complete strangers sang their hearts out. Their joy became a physical manifestation. You could feel it.
I think about experience for a living: why people choose one brand over another and what earns the next stay. At the Rose Bowl, I had an uncomfortable thought. Many of those concertgoers were likely staying in a hotel. Has the hospitality industry done anything to nourish and foster the kind of joy Kahan was providing?
Hoteliers talk ad nauseam about the experience economy. We measure guest satisfaction against standards “we” create and congratulate “ourselves” on the score. But look closely at what surveys capture: competence, tidiness, a smooth check-in. Useful things, yes, but joy can’t be unearthed in those questions. Likelihood-to-recommend is not elation. Net Promoter Score does not measure awe.
We have not just failed to measure joy. Somewhere along the way, we began choking it.
COVID thinned out talent pipelines and org charts. Costs rose faster than revenues. We trimmed a layer of management here, a warm body at the desk there and declared it efficiency. We cut joy inside the building and then wondered why less of it reached the guest or consumer outside.
There is another truth. The World Health Organization reported last year that one in six people globally is affected by loneliness. Against every assumption, the loneliest cohort is not the elderly. It is the young. My daughter’s and son’s generation. The very people who lit up that stadium because, for one night, they were not alone.
Hospitality is one of the few industries whose actual product is human connection. A guest can be genuinely moved by someone who sees them, welcomes them and remembers them; not their room number, but their story. At the exact moment the world is starving for that connection, we are quietly automating away many of the people through whom it travels.
I am not bashing AI. I believe it can help us connect more, not less. But the real question is what we do with the time it creates. Do we reinvest it into human moments or simply strip out cost? Giving people back time does not automatically create joy. An emptier building is still an emptier building.
These are my thoughts, my concert, my daughter, and my three-in-the-morning conviction that somewhere along the way, we’ve mislaid something important. But I sharpened these ideas over several late nights with Claude, batting them back and forth like a girls’ night with a good bottle of wine. And that’s the point: Claude didn’t have the thought; it wasn’t at the Rose Bowl; it simply helped me find the words faster. It’s not a substitute for human spark, but a way to fan it.
Think of joy like VO2 max: as a measure of capacity. Joy has a capacity, too: The most happiness a person, team or organization can release, exchange and receive. It runs on people who feel valued enough to give it away. The HSMAI Foundation’s forthcoming “State of Talent” report points to emotional wellness and engagement as growing casualties. That is not a soft finding. It is the joy engine losing momentum.
I’m eight months into a new chapter at Loews Hotels & Co, a genuinely happy move where I’ve seen that joy can still be real and alive. Not perfect, but present. Which is exactly why I know this is a choice, not a fate. If it can be protected in one house, it can be rebuilt across an industry.
A stadium without a performance is just seats. A hotel without a story, without people who care because joy is flowing through their teams, tools and incentives, is just a building with rooms.
We used to be the reason people traveled. Lately, at best, we’re the side show to the fiddle and the banjo. We did this to ourselves. Which means we can undo it, too.
As Noah Kahan closed his show and my daughter turned to me, still glowing, I felt both the joy and the gap. This is what her generation is quietly desperate for. The question that will define our industry is not whether AI makes us faster; it is whether we use everything we’re building to once again be a place where a traveler is truly seen and to put joy back.
Story contributed by Kristie Goshow, chief commercial officer, Loews Hotels & Co