Expected, not processed

By David Neddam

An arrival that goes well, on paper

A guest walks in. Someone looks up, asks for a name, finds the booking, hands over a form and points to a seat.

Everything is correct. Nothing went wrong.

Now ask what the guest understood in that minute. That the booking exists. That the team is busy. That they are the 11 o’clock.

But did they understand that they were expected?

A guest who is processed is handled correctly. A guest who is expected feels that someone knew they were coming. The steps can be almost identical. The experience is not necessarily.

This first contact deserves more attention than it often gets. A study published in 2024 in the Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics examined interactions between front-desk staff and guests checking in to a hotel for the first time. The researchers found that the quality of these interactions influenced satisfaction and attitude toward the hotel.

The study is about hotels, not specifically spas. But it confirms an important point: the welcome is not only an administrative step. It is already part of the experience the guest forms of the place.

What it usually hides

When a welcome feels cold, the first reflex is to look at the person at the front desk.

Not warm enough. Not smiling enough. Not attentive enough.

So owners ask for more smiles, repeat the right attitudes or write a welcome script.

But look at what that person is actually doing when a guest walks in.

Answering the phone. Looking for a booking that was changed yesterday and never written down. Finding out that a therapist is running late. Learning, at the same time as the guest, what the guest booked.

In those conditions, the difficulty does not necessarily come from attitude. It may come from what the organization did not allow that person to prepare.

Research on how services work shows that the experience a customer has depends on several elements that interact: people, processes, information and the means available. What shows at the desk is sometimes the consequence of what was not done, passed on or clarified beforehand.

That distinction is essential.

You can teach a receptionist to say the guest’s first name. You cannot ask them to truly recognize the guest’s situation if they have received no information about it.

You can improve the words of welcome. That does not fix an incomplete booking, a delay nobody communicated or a guest preference that never reached the front desk.

A welcome script can be useful. But it does not replace preparation.

A three-minute wait is not always the same wait

The problem does not end once the guest is checked in.

Picture two situations.

In the first, the guest arrives and is simply told to wait. Nobody explains what comes next. They look around, look for a sign, wonder whether they have been forgotten.

In the second, someone acknowledges their arrival, shows them where to sit and explains what will happen next.

The waiting time can be identical. What the guest lives during that time is not.

Research published in 1998 in the International Journal of Research in Marketing showed that satisfaction with a wait did not depend only on its measured length. How the wait is perceived, and the setting in which it happens, also play an important part.

So it is not enough to measure how many minutes a guest waits.

You also need to look at what they understand during those minutes.

Do they know someone is taking care of them? Do they understand why they are waiting? Do they know what happens next?

These are not grand gestures. They are simple pieces of information, given at the right moment.

The team still has to have them.

What to look at before changing anything

Stand near your entrance for an hour, at a busy time, and watch.

Not to grade the smiles. To understand what guests live through and what the team knows when it receives them.

1. When the front desk is busy, how long before a guest who walks in gets a glance and a word?
2. Does the team know who is coming in the next hour, and for what, before those guests arrive?
3. Is the guest asked for information they already gave when they booked?
4. Does a returning guest have to introduce themselves again?
5. When something has changed — a room, a time, a therapist — who tells the guest, and when?

And above all: when a welcome does not go as planned, is it a lack of attention, a lack of information, a coordination problem or something else?

Do not decide on the cause before you have looked.

None of these questions asks the front desk to be artificially warmer. They aim to understand what allows, or prevents, properly receiving the person who arrives.

What it changes

A guest who feels expected does not need to spend their first minutes checking that they are in the right place, that their booking is understood or that someone knows what they came for.

They can begin to take their place in the experience.

This matters especially in a spa, where the guest is often asked to leave the pace of their day gradually and enter a different environment.

The arrival should make that transition easier, not add uncertainty to it.

The team’s work can change too. A front desk that knows the coming arrivals, the important changes and the useful information has better conditions to welcome, anticipate and explain.

This does not mean every difficulty will disappear, or that every guest will have the same expectations.

It simply means that before investing in a new desk, more training or a more elaborate welcome speech, there is a more fundamental question to examine.

What does your team really know about the guest who is about to walk in?

Because being processed means the business found your booking.

Being expected means it prepared to receive you.

Sources and research

Meng, T. and Lai, I. K. W. (2024). How employee-guest interactions and welcome hospitality create brand attitudes for first-time hotel customers. Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, 37(1), 115–131. https://doi.org/10.1108/APJML-03-2024-0376

Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L. and Morgan, F. N. (2008). Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation. California Management Review, 50(3), 66–94. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166446

Pruyn, A. and Smidts, A. (1998). Effects of waiting on the satisfaction with the service: Beyond objective time measures. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 15(4), 321–334. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-8116(98)00008-1