What is Impact Hospitality?
Over the last 3 years I’ve helped to create, define, and embody the definition of Impact Hospitality. I frequently get asked the meaning of the words, impact hospitality, so I thought it would be helpful to give you my best attempt at providing an understanding. Let’s start with the definition of hospitality. It’s defined as “generous and friendly treatment of visitors and guests or hospitable treatment.” Hospitality also refers to the hotel, or food and beverage industry. This is where I believe there is a separation between the definition and the association with industries catering to guests.
I believe in the positive parts of capitalism and unfortunately the positive and negative aspects of it are very hard to separate. I’ve found the hospitality industry to be less than hospitable internally and externally apart from the treatment of paying customers. Traditionally it’s been rigid, singularly focused, and transactional. It hasn’t been community or people centric. When I say people, I don’t mean customers, even though that can be argued too. When it comes to impact, skeptics of conscious capitalism believe doing good costs money and doesn’t have a return. Others (and I) believe the return on investment has a second parallel method of calculation that is called return on impact.
Impact Hospitality is generous, welcoming, and friendly towards visitors, guests, employees, and the community with an intentional focus on improving current conditions of all. It’s also profitable for the business. That isn’t an assumption, it’s a fact that we are proving at Revival. As the Director Culture and Impact at Revival, I am 80% responsible for supporting local entrepreneurs and early childhood education efforts. The remaining 20% is flexible and open to addressing the needs of fellow employees, local socioeconomic challenges, and other philanthropic interests. On the surface, that should be helpful. Going deeper would require more metrics, insights, and sharing of case studies from over the last 3 years. I hope that was helpful. Please reach out if you have any questions via my contact page and I’d love to read your comments.
