Is Brand More Important Than Service?

First impressions are important. My mother's drilled that into me ever since I was little. She'd always used to say that how you present yourself is how you'll be remembered. It's a sign of respect, to yourself and to others, to care about how you show up in the world.

Branding relies quite heavily on first impressions. Logos, colours, fonts, stories. And the hospitality industry has churned out some exceptional brands. But here's something else my mother taught me: a good first impression means nothing if there's no real substance behind it.

A modern hotel is well versed in the first impression. The real challenge is everything that comes after.

Back in January, we stayed at Hotel Saint Vincent in New Orleans. It started off weird. They sent us to our room only to find the bed wasn't made, and there were towels sprawled across the floor. We took a photo to show reception, who promptly apologised and tried to find us another room, one that was actually ready this time.

Strike one.

Later, heading out, we asked the concierge for a coffee shop recommendation. She seemed stumped. Not even a polite pivot or a follow-up question. No, "What kind of coffee do you like?" or "How far are you willing to walk?" That is your literal job as a concierge, to have recommendations ready to go. It's not a trick question.

Strike two.

The thing is, Hotel Saint Vincent is a stunning property. They've clearly invested in making the place look good. But after my stay, I'm not going to remember the wallpaper or the towels on the floor. I'm going to remember the concierge who couldn't name a single café. And while I don't think it's incompetence, I do think it's the logical endpoint of a business model that separated brand investment from service investment.

This has been nagging at me because it's becoming a common occurrence. I think back to last year when we stayed at Bowie House, an Auberge property in Fort Worth. Again, the design, as you'd expect from Auberge, is gorgeous. But upon check-out, there were issues with the bill, including charges that shouldn't have been there and line items we hadn't agreed to. When we raised it, the response felt like we were apologising to them for their mistake.

The modern hospitality industry has become so focused on building brands that it's forgotten how to deliver good service. A hotel cannot rely solely on good design when the core offering is missing, which is the part where someone actually looks after their guests. And I don't believe this is accidental. It's systemic.

Brand became so important because hotels needed a way to compete for guests without competing on price, and to attract owner investment without owning assets. A strong brand is a distribution mechanism. It brings guests through loyalty programmes and booking platforms, and it gives owners confidence that their investment will perform. Brand was a rational, even brilliant solution to a specific problem. But my issue with it is that it became so successful as a financial instrument that it decoupled from what it was supposed to represent, which is a consistent guest experience.

Major hotel groups have spent the last two decades migrating towards what's known as the asset light model. In simple terms, companies like Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt increasingly don't own or operate their hotels anymore. They license their brand names to third party owners, who then hire management companies to actually run the properties. The brand company takes its franchise fees. The owner carries the debt and the operational costs. And the management company handles the day-to-day. There are different motivations at play, and the guest appears to sit at the bottom of each incentive structure.

The results have been, for the brand companies at least, noteworthy. Marriott operates north of 9,500 properties across more than 30 brands. Hilton has gone from 12 brands to 26 since 2010. And Hyatt offloaded over $2 billion in physical hotel assets last year while simultaneously launching new brand labels. The pipeline keeps lengthening.

But brand investment and service investment now sit in separate budgets, controlled by different people with different incentives. The brand company protects its name through marketing, design standards, loyalty programmes and visual identity. The property owner, carrying the debt, has every reason to cut operating costs (we all know the single biggest cost in any hotel is labour). And while no one sat down and decided that service doesn't matter, they did decide that the economics structurally favour one over the other.

According to CBRE's 2025 Hotel Brand Performance report, major hotel companies have doubled their brand portfolios over the past decade, to an average of 24 brands each. But in inflation-adjusted terms, revenue per available room has fallen nearly 11% since 2019. The fastest growing brand family by number of brands posted the slowest revenue growth (0.3% annually). Essentially, more brands, less revenue per brand.

"Hotel brands are not over-created but under-destroyed."

Chekitan Dev, Cornell University

I also think about the housekeeping situation. Marriott and Hilton have eliminated daily housekeeping as a default at many of their properties. Guests have to opt in. The exception is their luxury tier. So the more expensive the property, the more likely basic service remains intact. Which tells you exactly where service sits in the priority structure. It's not a standard, but something you earn with your room rate.

I've previously written about the tendency for hotels to over-explain their brand identity, narrating every choice, justifying every detail, as though the guest can't work out for themselves what's what. I've since come to realise that the over-explanation is a form of compensation. When a property can't differentiate on service, because the money simply isn't there for the staffing levels required, it tries to be unique with its brand story instead.

The boutique hotel movement was supposed to be the antithesis of all this. And for a while, it was. But once developers figured out that design-forward branding could command premium rates, the logic inverted. Social media made it worse, obviously. The visual medium rewards photogenic interiors above all else, and hotels invested accordingly.

To be honest, great design is the bare minimum these days. There are plenty of cool looking hotels. What remains unrewarded, and therefore unfunded, is the quality of the human experience inside the building. If we're all claiming that true luxury is experiential, then experiential quality is a function of people.

Contrast this with a tiny inn we stayed at one time in Aspen. The Annabelle Inn. Not exactly what you'd call five-star comforts. The rooms were fine, nothing to write home about from a design point of view. But the service was absolutely incredible. They called us ahead of time and kept us updated about the weather. When we arrived, they had answers ready for everything, including where to eat, what to do and how to get around. They took care of us. Really, genuinely took care of us. It felt like staying at an aunt's house.

As far as I'm concerned, The Annabelle Inn has no brand story to speak of. It will never trend on anyone's feed. But I'd go back in a heartbeat. Hotel Saint Vincent, for all its aesthetic intelligence, left me with a question mark. And Bowie House, despite being objectively slick, made me feel like an inconvenience.

The places getting it right have a few things in common. One, they're usually owner-operated, meaning the person who cares about service is also the one writing the cheques. Two, they invest in keeping staff, not cycling through seasonal hires. Three, they're smaller, since they're aware that attention doesn't scale past a certain point. And four, they don't confuse brand story with brand identity. Brand story is the narrative a hotel constructs and broadcasts. Brand identity, however, is what actually accumulates through repeated experience. The best hotels have both in alignment.

Loyalty programmes won't get us there, by the way. They were originally designed to reward repeat guests. So they're nothing more than a service function. They've since become branding tools. Tiers, points, status. They create the illusion of being valued without requiring anyone at the hotel to actually make you feel that way.

I have to implicate myself here. I've chosen to stay at hotels based on what they look like and been disappointed by the stay. I've walked past extraordinary service without pausing to acknowledge it because the rooms weren't photogenic enough. I've recommended properties on the strength of their aesthetic intelligence without asking hard questions about how they actually treat guests. I've written about hotels the way the industry wants to be written about, leading with the visual and the designed, and in doing so, contributed to the exact set of incentives I'm now critiquing.

Demand shapes supply, and we demanded the wrong things. We rewarded properties that looked best on a screen and we made aesthetics the currency of good hospitality. The industry, quite rationally, spent accordingly. Until we start demanding differently, nothing changes. The poor old concierge who couldn't name a coffee shop is merely a symptom of the conditions we created.