A few years ago, someone at a dinner party mentioned a place they’d stayed. A small hotel. No one had asked about travel. It just surfaced.
And the way they described it wasn’t like a review. It was like a memory they’d been carrying around, waiting for a reason to open.
That moment stuck with me. Because it explained something I’d been circling for a while: why some properties get talked about for years—and others disappear the moment the stay ends.
The difference isn’t marketing. It’s memory.
The episode is live now. In it, I unpack:
→ Why organic word-of-mouth has nothing to do with asking → What Cheerios understands about triggers that most hotels don’t → The hot chocolate I still think about thirty years later → What the “curse of knowledge” is costing you → One thing to try this week
One idea to sit with:
Most stays are beautiful, isolated memories that fade.
The question isn’t how big the experience is. It’s whether it has a hook into ordinary life. Something that keeps surfacing.
You probably already have something like this at your property. The light that hits differently at a certain hour. A smell guests notice before they see anything. A sound that belongs only to this place.
The problem isn’t that it doesn’t exist. The problem is that you’ve stopped seeing it.
Your guests don’t hear the melody. They just hear taps.
If this resonates:
Leave a comment below—what’s the thing guests mention in reviews that surprises you? The detail you didn’t design on purpose?
That’s usually where the real signature is hiding.
—Kay
