It's Time to Let "Experiential Hospitality" Die
If you remove the building and keep the people, do you still have something worth paying for?
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I once dated someone who worked for an aviation company called AeroAir. I remember laughing when they said the name out loud, because it sounded like a parody of aviation branding—like a business created solely to reassure you that, yes, the thing you’re about to do involves air. I asked if, on board, they served HydroWater. They didn’t laugh as much as I did, which probably tells you something about both of us.
But it’s the same joke in my head every time someone in the hotel industry says “experiential hospitality.” It’s wet water. It’s edible food. It’s AeroAir. If it’s hospitality, it’s already experiential. If it isn’t experiential, then stop calling it hospitality. You’re selling lodging.
“Experiential hospitality” is a euphemism for “we’ve accidentally built a lot of hotels that don’t feel like anything.”
That distinction matters, because the word “experiential” is doing a silent but brutal piece of category damage: it implies there are two types of hospitality—one that is alive and one that is baseline. It turns the core job into a niche add-on. It’s the industry admitting, accidentally, that a lot of what it produces is not hospitality at all. It’s a room inventory business with a check-in script.
