Presence Is Profitable

I was reading Unreasonable Hospitality recently, and one observation stayed with me.

The author, Will Guidara, describes two types of servers. Some move quickly—turning tables fast, maximizing volume, staying constantly in motion. Others move differently. They slow down enough to notice things. They engage more fully with guests. They make people feel attended to instead of processed.

You would assume the first group earns more money. They often don’t.

The servers who are more present frequently earn more in tips, despite handling fewer tables.

I remember seeing the same thing when I worked in restaurants. There was one server who could turn tables incredibly fast and handle far more volume than almost anyone else on the floor. But there were other servers who moved more slowly, lingered longer with guests, and built real familiarity with them.

Guests would come back and ask for those servers by name.

And many nights, they made just as much money—sometimes more.

At first, that feels counterintuitive. Hospitality businesses are trained to think efficiency creates value: more volume, tighter turns, leaner labor models.

But guests rarely evaluate hospitality the same way operators measure it.

They respond to attentiveness. Feeling understood. Feeling cared for. Feeling like someone noticed them.

The same tension exists across hotels:

• lean staffing models

• compressed check-ins

• faster room turns

• constant pressure to do more with less

None of those decisions are irrational on their own. Most are attempts to protect margins in an increasingly difficult operating environment.

But there’s a tradeoff hospitality businesses don’t always acknowledge clearly enough: the more tightly every moment is optimized for efficiency, the less space employees have to meaningfully engage with guests.

The issue is not that hospitality teams don’t care enough. It’s that many operating systems leave very little room for care to visibly exist.

A front desk agent noticing a delayed traveler is exhausted and adjusting their approach. A housekeeper recognizing that details shape emotional comfort, not just cleanliness. A staff member lingering long enough to solve a problem before it becomes frustration.

These moments rarely look important operationally. But they often shape how guests evaluate the entire stay.

Teams are told to create memorable guest experiences while simultaneously being measured against speed, productivity, and labor efficiency at nearly every turn.

And most will choose the metric the system actually rewards.

I think about this tension often while building Jane Hospitality. One of the questions I keep returning to is how to create operating systems that protect attentiveness instead of unintentionally squeezing it out. I don’t think the industry has fully solved that yet.

My instinct is that the answer is less about adding performative service standards and more about creating enough operational and emotional margin for employees to stay genuinely attentive to the people in front of them.

The opportunity is not to reject operational discipline. Strong systems matter. Efficiency matters.

But hospitality changes when employees no longer have enough room to be present with the people in front of them.

The operators who outperform long term are often not the ones optimizing hardest. They are the ones who understand that presence is part of what guests value most.