I just read two great posts about hospitality. This one, from Chris Bailey at Alchemy of Soulful Work, spins off an article in Fast Company about New York restauranteur Danny Meyer, who said:

Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side.

Chris says:

what would happen if we think of the transaction as a binding force for a relationship? How would our business change if we acknowledged that a transaction is not only a financial exchange, but also an exchange of feelings, hopes, and dreams?

What if, indeed. Then there’s Michael Chaffin’s take on the topic here, which reminds us what exactly hospitality is supposed to mean.

Both are great reads, and good ideas to contemplate as we head toward the new year.

That’s just one of the 100 things we didn’t know last year, brought to you by the BBC (and each comes with a link for more information, such as this one for the headline eggs-ample). Some others are:

Urban birds have developed a short, fast “rap style” of singing, different from their rural counterparts.
The Pope’s been known to wear red Prada shoes.
More than 90% of plane crashes have survivors.
The medical name for the part of the brain associated with teenage sulking is “superior temporal sulcus”.
Cows can have regional accents

And: “Online shoppers will only wait an average of four seconds for an internet page to load before giving up.” Another reason to double-check your registration site to make sure it loads quickly!

Flights having unscheduled landings due to escaped hampsters and flatulent fliers, human skull collectors, X-rayed babies…yep, 2006 was a banner year for whacked out travel-related stories. Read ‘em and weep here. I hadn’t heard the one about the pig at the Holiday Inn before.

Here’s a scary little thought from Gary Spotts on Fast Company’s Expert Blogs: Beware: Your Company Could Be “YouTubed”.

In August 2006, Senator George Allen got burned by a scandalous videoclip posted on YouTube. Up next, the video takedown of a major corporation. Are you prepared?

Corporations, brands and executives should brace themselves for the brave new world of global, viral visuals. Corporate dirty laundry can be captured by a cell phone video, posted on YouTube, and then spread like wilefire in the blogosphere, on social networking sites and by word-of-mouth emails.

While I’m a big fan of transparency, this could be the downside. Short of strip-searching attendees or making them sign confidentiality agreements when they register, you have no way to stop someone who wants to audio- or videotape your meeting, and anything is fair game for global distribution these days. I know planners do everything humanly possible to make sure everything runs smoothly and that there would be nothing that most organizations wouldn’t be delighted to share with the world, but what if your CEO bumbles a joke, a la John Kerry’s gaffe on Iraq, and it flashed around the world, delighting your competitors?

I just hope it doesn’t end up stifling free speech or the unfettered sharing of ideas as a side effect. Happy paranoid New Year, everyone.

Hospitality industry watchers Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell have released their 2007 predictions. Among them are that leisure travel will continue to outpace business travel as business folks try to replace trips with technology; and that air and hotel rates will continue to rise. I thought this one was interesting, too:

The new “lifestyle” hotel brands such as NYLO, ALOFT, etc. will continue to gain both exposure and popularity among the next generation of travelers (the Millennials), as well as more mature travelers who wish to look, act and feel like Millennials

I just ran across the Gender Genie, a site where you can plug in some text and it will tell you what gender it thinks the author might be. I must be sending mixed messages: When I put in text from this story I wrote for Medical Meetings, it came back strongly male. But when it analyzed this post from yesterday, it said I wrote like a woman for sure.

It’s interesting to see which words it considers masculine, and which it considers feminine. I wonder if speakers ever think about word choice in this way and try to match the perceived gender of their words to the gender of their audiences, if speaking to a mostly male or mostly female group? I doubt it, but it’d be interesting to see if changing “masculine” words to feminine would make the speaker better received among a group of women (or vice versa for a group of men)?

Update: And now I just ran across another interesting male/female thing: the gender brain quiz. It takes a few minutes to complete, but it’s interesting. I’m not sure if it says as much about gender as it does about thinking/learning styles and abilities in general, but it’s kind of cool. And it may just answer Professor Higgins’ question about “Why can’t a woman think more like a man?” (Kidding, just kidding.)

While I sit here on hold, allow me to vent a bit. I had to cancel a trip last spring, so I notified the travel agency I booked the flight through that I had to cancel. They said I could use the credit toward another trip within a year, no problem. Just call the airline and give them the ticket number and you’re good to go.

So, now I’m trying to do just that. I called the airline, and found out that the travel agency didn’t cancel my ticket, so it isn’t any good after all, but the airline can work with me on it. The airline agent I spoke with said she just had to explain the situation to a supervisor and they’d sign off on it. Which she did, then made the new reservation and applied the credit to it. But–she couldn’t book it because it had to run through the agency because of the IATA number.

OK, so I call the agency, and they can’t find any sign of the original ticket. I gave him the ticket number, the locator number, the dates, etc., etc., and eventually he admitted that the original flight did exist but, because I didn’t cancel it (I did, they didn’t), it was worthless. So I explained that I already went through all this with the airline, and they were all set, it just had to be booked through the agency. He said there was no way he could do that, that I had to go back to the airline and say they were no longer our agency (as of 1/1/07 they won’t be, and I’m not sad about that). I pointed out that they’re still stuck with me until Monday.

I finally got him to actually call the airline, and now they’re saying they don’t have anything about the ticket being signed off on in their records, and we’re back to square one because I didn’t get the name of the airline agent I got on the 800 number so I can prove I’m not making it all up. He’s also telling me that I should have documentation that I called the agency last spring to cancel the original flight. How I would do that I have no idea. *sigh*

Two hours later, I’m still on hold, but I don’t foresee this having a happy ending. I guess I could live with eating the $280, but the holiday Muzak the agency has on while I’m holding just may make me homicidal.

I feel better now. Thanks for listening.

Customers Are Always says that the Telephone Doctor is holding a contest to see who has the best customer service stories. This could be a good way to let the world know how above and beyond that CSM went, or the difference that housekeeper made to your attendees—and give a little more prominence to the meeting planner business to boot. The winner gets $1,000, with second and third place winners receiving $250 and $100, and the company may include your story in a book about, of course, great customer service.

I say, go for it. E-mail your stories to bestcustomerservicestory [at] telephone doctor.com. The deadline for entries is Jan. 31, 2007. I hadn’t run across Customers Are Always before, either, but it’s well worth a read for those of us interested in customer service, both giving and receiving (which is just about everyone, right?).

When I read this post by Jason about his family’s experience flying, I had to wonder if airlines’ relatively new practice of letting people check in ahead of time online could cause problems for those who actually show up on time at the airport. From Jason’s post:

My family arrived at the airport for their flight TWO AND A HALF HOURS EARLY, like you’re supposed to. However, they could not get boarding passes because the flight was ENTIRELY CHECKED IN via Online Check-In.

So my family sat around for two and a half hours to fly standby on a flight they booked months ago and and got to the airport for in more than plenty of time. They sat at the gate and watched people show up more than an hour later than them and get seats, no problem.

I haven’t had this happen to me yet, but if it did, I’d be pretty ticked about it, too.

Check out this editorial in the New York Times. It made me smile, I’m not sure why. A snip:

“Short days,” said Randy J. Nelson, a professor of psychology at the Ohio State University Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, whose studies of depression and anxiety in hamsters lend insight into how seasonal changes affect humans. “Here in Ohio, we’re at about the same latitude as you, and the shortest day is about eight hours of light,” Dr. Nelson said. “Anywhere less than 11 hours is a short day.”

Short days lead to winter blues. Short days cause hamsters’ brains to shrink. Short days impair their ability to remember and to learn.

“Do hamsters ever get too listless to shop?” I asked.

“It’s tricky to measure mood in animals because they aren’t verbal,” Dr. Nelson said. “Most rodents tend to stay out of an open area during short days, and to stay on the periphery. If you gave a hamster Valium, it might venture out into the open.”

“Or white wine?” I asked.

“We haven’t tried that,” he said.