The business traveller has a lot to think about. Not only do they have to be focused on work, they need to do it while navigating what might be a new city, far away from home.
In such circumstances, practical and emotional support is essential, not only to help them perform well in their job, but also to enable them to feel relaxed and make the most of their downtime. Crowne Plaza® Hotels & Resorts is keenly aware of the challenges facing today’s business traveller, and of how they need to feel relaxed and positive after a hard day’s work. It adopts a holistic approach to its guests’ well-being, and in teaming up with The School of Life, it aims to further champion this work/life balance.
The School of Life is a global organisation dedicated to developing emotional intelligence (EI) by applying psychology, philosophy and culture to everyday life. Sarah Stein Lubrano, Head of Content at The School of Life, defines EI as “The development of the psychological tools we need to take care of our emotional lives, helping people understand themselves better”.
“When we are practising emotional intelligence, we can navigate around our emotions in a wider way and become better colleagues, better leaders at work and better communicators. People can trust us because we’re demonstrating self-awareness. Not only does this enable us to work more effectively with other people, it allows us to have better relationships in our personal lives too,” Sarah says.
Alain De Botton, philosopher and founder of The School of Life, sees the ‘travel’ aspect of business travel as fundamentally important.
“Travel plays a crucial role in our lives,” he says. “It allows us to shift our mindset, to entertain new ideas, to connect with parts of ourselves that aren’t easy to access at home. And an emotionally intelligent hotel can help us to do this better, providing us not only with material comforts but also a stimulating, supportive environment for us to work, think, and know ourselves better.”
Helping hospitality
Once Crowne Plaza had teamed up with The School of Life, it was quick to see how emotional intelligence would benefit not only hotel colleagues, but guests too, and it set about finding practical ways to put emotional intelligence in action.
“The Crowne Plaza brand team realised that many of their guests’ needs were emotional, so they wanted to look at new ways to meet those needs,” says Sarah.
“With today’s business traveller, they wanted to find ways to help make them feel more empowered when coming to the hotel. They also wanted to tackle the fact that many business travellers feel lonely away from home and family, and to help them manage not just their professional life but also their downtime while travelling.”
Knowing your business traveller
Being part of the hospitality industry puts Crowne Plaza in something of a unique position to understand what makes people tick: colleagues at the hotel see all kinds of people walking through its doors and, even though many of them might be business travellers, the needs of each individual can vary enormously. Knowing how best to meet those needs is where The School of Life provided invaluable input.
“There are things you might practise in a hotel depending on your role, like how to use the operating system for bookings, how to make a really good omelette and so on,” says Sarah. “We look at emotional intelligence the same way, in so far as it’s something you need to practise, to work at. With hotel guests, it has a lot to do with treating people as individuals and adapting to their specific circumstances.”
“For example, given business travel can be lonely, Crowne Plaza colleagues are trained to better sense when a guest wants to connect. So a lot of the initiative with Crowne Plaza has revolved around how to be really attentive to the guests, how to notice their emotional state and how to help meet not just their practical needs but their emotional ones as well.”
This sense of connection between guests and hotel colleagues is already having a wonderful, and sometimes unexpected, effect. A Crowne Plaza colleague who’d been applying The School of Life’s approach happened to mention to a guest that they were training to run a marathon for charity. When the guest returned to the hotel a week later for another stay, they announced they had donated to the Crown Plaza colleague’s chosen charity.
Sarah frequently cites the importance of empathy in emotional intelligence, whether it’s with business colleagues, guests or our friends and loved ones, and clearly the result of such empathy is a win-win.
The holistic approach
Of course, if the team at Crowne Plaza are trained to better understand emotional intelligence, why can’t this be part of a broader movement to provide business travellers themselves with such tools? Sarah agrees.
“In addition to helping Crowne Plaza colleagues, we’ve created tools and content that help guests make the most of their stay,” she enthuses. “It’s about helping establish that balance between working and having some fruitful and enjoyable downtime,” says Sarah.
Given how emotional intelligence has helped enrich the brand’s holistic philosophy when it comes to its guests’ wellbeing, it would appear this is a relationship set to continue for a long time yet.
To find out more about how Crowne Plaza is changing the face of modern business travel, or to book a room, visit crowneplaza.com/businessmostly.
The service initiative discussed in this article is available at selected Crowne Plaza® Hotels & Resorts.