NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Bashar Wali believes there's one key element to a positive hotel stay.
Wali has long made his mark in the hospitality industry in the boutique and lifestyle hotel space, formerly with Provenance Hotels and now as founder and CEO of related hospitality companies This Assembly and Practice Hospitality. But he believes the that one vital piece is something that can happen at any hotel.
"I only remember [a hotel stay] when someone goes out of their way and genuinely cares," he said on the latest episode of the Hotel News Now podcast.
Wali has grown a reputation as an outspoken critic of what he sees as some of the hotel industry's shortcomings, including how he views typical hotel brand loyalty programs as more built around bribery than true loyalty. But he also sees the value in what hotel brands are doing, and acknowledges that sometimes he's speaking more to an ideal of what hotels can and should be rather than the reality of what they are.
The way Wali views loyalty can be distilled into example of the television show "Cheers."
"They never said: 'We are at the best bar, the most award-winning bar with the biggest wine list,'" he said. "They said, 'It's where everyone knows your name.' And that's why it matters."
He said the term he now leans on for that feeling in hospitality is a "longing for belonging."
"I think as humans we have strayed away from religion; we've strayed away from political parties; kids now move and never come back home. So we're all dying to find a place to belong," Wali said. "Hotels have an opportunity for a moment in time, a night or two nights, to make you feel like we are your tribe. You belong. You arrived, and we care for you."
For more from Hotel News Now's interview with Bashar Wali, listen to the podcast above, and subscribe to the Hotel News Now podcast wherever you find podcasts.